NICE.- For Marc Chagall’s whole life (1887-1985), The Bible was a major source of inspiration. The seventeen paintings of the Biblical Message kept in the Marc Chagall National Museum provide the best testimony evidence: painted between 1956 and 1966, their message of universal love and their creative freedom make them one of the most important spiritual legacy of the artist.

The exhibition offers a return in the past, some thirty-five years earlier when the artist began his studies on biblical themes by producing a masterly series of gouaches.

In 1930, Marc Chagall and the publisher Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939) begin their third collaboration. After creating the illustrations for Gogol's Dead souls and for La Fontaine's Fables, the Parisian publisher asked Marc Chagall to produce engravings to illustrate the Bible. It was the beginning of a remarkable publishing project, which for economic and political reasons, would only come to fruition twenty-six years later. In 1956, publisher Teriade (1897-1983) took over the project and published a monumental book, illustrated with one hundred and five plates engraved by Marc Chagall.

Thanks to the donations made by Marc and Valentina Chagall to the French State in 1966 and 1972, the museum owns the gouaches, the illustrated book of The Bible and the copper plates which were used as a matrix for the prints. Rarely shown because of their fragility, these forty gouaches have recently undergone major restoration work, bringing back all the freshness and the brilliance of the original colours. A selection of engravings for The Bible will be presented at the same time. Thanks to a recent donation, this presentation of the technique is completed by the presentation to the public, for the very first time, of a printing press Marc Chagall installed later in his house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.

Following the biblical text, the visitor will discover Marc Chagall's vision for the cycle of Noah, Abraham, Joseph and Moses. Inspired by the Torah, by Chagall's Jewish childhood in Belarus but also by the trip he made to Palestine in 1931, these preparatory gouaches for the engravings reveal a peculiar vision of the Bible that is, in turn, tragic, prosaic or surreal.

Exhibiting these gouaches next to the Biblical Message paintings, shows the richness of the collections of the National Marc Chagall museum but, above all, it gives the visitor an unique opportunity to understand the extraordinary creative journey of one of the major artists of the 20th century.

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication: Marc Chagall. Colours for the Bible. It sets out to explore the importance of the Bible in Chagall's work and to place it context within a vast revival movement for sacred art in the 20th century.

"Ever since my earliest youth, I have been captivated by the Bible. I have always thought and still think that it is the greatest source of poetryof all time.” ---Marc Chagall's inauguration speech of the museum of Nice, on the 7th of July 1973