If I had to choose only two museums to visit in my lifetime, one would be Museé Chagall in Nice and the other, in Paris, the Museé Rodin. Over and over and over again I have found myself artistically and spiritually moved sometimes to tears as I regard the works in these two places.

Many years ago, when my husband and I lived in New Jersey, we drove to NYC to visit the United Nations and inside we saw our first glimpse of a work by Chagall, his stained glass windows that grace the building. More than forty years later, while I was a student studying French at l’Institut in Villefranche sur Mer, a classmate and I took the bus, a mere ten minute ride to Nice to see the Chagall museum. My mind started to spin as I viewed the kaleidoscope of both colors and symbols that were painted in oil on each of twelve huge panels with symbols depicting Old Testament stories. The panels are perhaps eight feet long and seven feet high. There are an additional five panels each telling the story of one verse of Song of Songs from the Songs of Solomon, paying a deeply sensual, loving homage to each of his two wives. The paintings evoke pathos, joy, life, death, sensuality, mysticism, spirituality and Biblical scenes that most of us can remember from childhood…Jacob’s Ladder, Jonah and the Whale among them. For the first time in the history of art, his panel of Noah’s Ark is painted as if one were viewing the inside of the ark. Just have to say, that is truly thinking outside the box!!!

Chagall lived in France and painted these panels between 1954 and 1967, thirteen years of intense work to create the seventeen panels from 105 etchings he made while living in earlier times in France and in Palestine. (Chagall was of Russian birth, lived in Paris, Russia, the United States, Palestine and the South of France during his lifetime.)

While spending time in the museum with stereo headphones telling both the technical and symbolic details of Chagall’s work, it is easy to become totally immersed in these magnificent works. Chagall’s deep inner spirituality is evident in every stroke of his brushes, every dip into the brilliant and the subtle colors he chose to illuminate his stories. There is something very childlike and primitive…innocent about the way he painted symbols, almost as if he had done them for a young viewer, for a children’s story. Yet the illustrations have deep symbolic meaning.  The colors, mostly primary colors, are brilliant hues of red, yellow, green, blue and a deeply intense rose color.  The photos I have taken are of one little scene on some of the large panels.  I found humor today in the yoga pose of one of the characters.

A half day passes without notice and as I remove the headphones I am overwhelmed, again and again by what I have just experienced. A welcome “sit” in a quiet stained glass-lined auditorium gives my mind time to settle in, to reflect once again on how a single man could tell so much with his palette of paints and pots of brushes. C’est magnifique. A moving spiritual experience. It will be the same when I arrive in Paris at the end of September and re-visit the sculptures in the August Rodin museum.

As has been written, ” Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” Viewing the collection of Marc Chagall’s paintings in Nice is one of those breath-taking experiences for me.

Today I also watched a movie of Chagall’s life in the stained glass chapel of the museum. One of the quotes that Chagall made in person in the movie was, “I like to look with the eyes of my soul. My hands, they do the painting.” And of the stained glass windows he designed and were created under his artistic direction, “Stained glass windows make a partition through my heart to the rest of the world”.