Art: A Museum with a Message

The Bible has been a source of inspiration for Marc Chagall ever since he was a boy living in the ghetto of Vitebsk in White Russia. He has drawn dozens of illustrations for the holy book During the 1960s, when he was a resident of Vence, a hill village above the French Riviera, he painted a series of radiantly colored oils depicting scenes from the Old Testament, intended to hang in several local chapels.

The chapels, it turned out, were too humid to house the canvases. "I don't want to sell these paintings. I'm going to give them to you," Chagall told Andre Malraux, France's Minister of Culture, whose fondness for Chagall's work resulted in major commissions for the painter in past years, notably the decorations for the ceiling of the Paris Opera. Replied Malraux: "All right, Chagall. Then we'll construct a building for them."

That was five years ago. Last week, on the artist's 86th birthday, the building was officially opened. A long, low complex of pale gray and white alpine stone set amidst silvery olive and eucalyptus trees in the ancient Roman quarter of Nice, the new museum was built at a cost of more than $2,000,000 on three acres of land donated by the city. It is the first French museum devoted to the works of a living artist. Formally called the National Museum of the Biblical Message of Marc Chagall, it is already a new stop on the rich Riviera route for modern art tourists that includes the Leger museum in Biot, the Picasso collection in Antibes, the Matisse chapel in Vence and the Maeght Foundation in St.-Paul-de-Vence.

In addition to the 17 big oils, Chagall also presented the new museum with 39 gouaches and 105 engravings dating from a trip to Palestine in 1931 (for Chagall's most celebrated graphic project, an illustrated Bible commissioned by Art Dealer Ambroise Vollard). There are also a number of other works, including three stained-glass windows designed especially for the concert hall that is part of the museum.

Clad in a paint-spattered sports coat ("I'm painting myself these days"), Chagall energetically, and critically, supervised the hanging of his works. Dismissing an awed admirer's allusion as "Chagall's Sistine Chapel" with a twinkling "Let's not exaggerate," the snowy-haired octogenarian defined his Biblical Message: "I want this place to be neither a museum nor a chapel but a place where everyone can come to pray or dream in his own way."