Exhibitions
Chagall between sketches, scenarios and forms
The Marc Chagall National Museum presents an exceptional selection of 141 works donated to French national collections.
The more experimental dimension of Marc Chagall takes center stage at the Marc Chagall National Museum with an exceptional exhibition that allows us to delve into the artist's creative process through sketches, models, ceramics, sculptures and collages. The exhibition, presented in two parts from February 7 to September 21, 2026, brings together a selection of works recently incorporated into French national collections thanks to donations from his granddaughters, Bella and Meret Meyer.
Between 2022 and 2023, Chagall's two granddaughters made it possible for 141 works by the artist to enter the collections of the Musée National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou through several exceptional donations. After its presentation in Paris between 2023 and 2024, this set now arrives at the Musée National Marc Chagall, where it is displayed in a tour organized around four large groups of work.
The exhibition allows us to discover a Chagall particularly interested in research and in transforming his ideas into large-scale projects. The preparatory materials reveal an artist who did not conceive of the work as an immediate result, but as a process in which color, movement, form and composition progressively found their place.
One of the main cores is formed by the 41 sketches and models related to the ceiling of the Opera Garnier in Paris, inaugurated in 1964. This set allows us to follow the different stages of conception of one of Chagall's most ambitious public interventions. The artist initially imagined the composition based on chromatic rhythms and, later, incorporated an iconography dedicated to the great composers he admired and to the city of Paris, where he had settled in 1923.
The exhibition also brings together 64 sketches for the stage curtains and costumes for the ballet The Firebird , created from the music of Igor Stravinsky. The ballet was revived by the New York Ballet Theatre in 1945, with choreography by Adolph Bolm, and later in 1949 with new choreography by George Balanchine.
In these pieces, Chagall explores the relationship between painting, scenography and movement. The sketches show how the artist experiments with monumentality and the way in which bodies can occupy and transform stage space. The theatre thus becomes a visual laboratory in which colour and form acquire an almost choreographic dimension.
A third area is dedicated to the 12 ceramics and sculptures, which demonstrate Chagall's constant curiosity to explore disciplines other than painting. His interest in clay and stone intensified from 1949, when he settled in Vence and came into contact with artists and ceramists such as Serge Ramel, Suzanne and Georges Ramié and Lanfranco Lisarelli.
Added to this set are 24 collages, the result of research developed especially between the 1960s and 1970s. Chagall worked at the time with fragments of paper and cut-out fabrics, constructing compositions that functioned both as preparatory studies for monumental projects and as purely formal investigations.
The diversity of materials and techniques allows us to understand the extent to which Chagall maintained an open attitude towards creation during the last decades of his career. Painting coexists with drawing, sculpture, ceramics and collage in a process of permanent experimentation.
The proposal is organized in two parts with rotation of the works. The first tour can be visited from February 7 to May 17, 2026, while the second will be open from May 23 to September 21, 2026. This structure allows to expand the number of pieces presented and offer different approaches to an exceptional collection. The exhibition is curated by Anne Dopffer, Chief Heritage Curator and Director of the National Museums of the 20th Century of the Alpes-Maritimes, and Grégory Couderc, Heritage Curator of the Marc Chagall National Museum.
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