Aosta exhibits 120 works by Chagall arriving from the national museum in Nice

The Regional Archaeological Museum of Aosta is hosting until October 25 the exhibition “Marc Chagall. Between Poetry and Spirituality”, open from June 20 every day from 9 to 19. The exhibition brings together 120 works including paintings, sculptures, gouaches, drawings, lithographs, books and ceramics, created between 1922 and 1980. The works come from the Musée national Marc Chagall in Nice and include works never before exhibited in Italy. The program is reported by Nos Alpes and the exhibition’s informational materials are also carried by Civonline.

The detail that sets this exhibition apart from the many summer shows is its provenance. One hundred and twenty works arriving all together from a single-artist national museum are not an ordinary loan: it means the institution holding the collection has agreed to temporarily strip its own galleries. The partnership with the Nice museum is stated openly, and curatorial responsibility is entrusted to Grégory Couderc, Anne Dopffer and Alberto Fiz, a group that brings together the French and Italian sides of the project.

Fifty-eight years of work in a single room. The chronological span runs from 1922 to 1980. It covers almost the artist’s entire maturity, and includes very different techniques: easel painting and ceramics, preparatory drawing and the illustrated book, lithography and sculpture. Such a broad selection across media tells a story about a way of working more than about a stylistic period: the idea that the same figure could move across canvas, lithographic plate and clay without changing in nature.

The stated theme. The exhibition path examines in particular the artist’s relationship with the sacred and with spirituality. This is the angle that justifies the link with the Nice collection, born around a core of works on biblical subjects, and at the same time the choice of a venue that normally houses archaeological material. An archaeological museum welcoming twentieth-century painting on the theme of the sacred sets up a non-obvious pairing between the material stratification of the past and a contemporary reading of the religious.

The geographic location is not incidental. Aosta sits on an axis that directly connects the Aosta Valley to the south of France, and an exhibition built with a French institution in a bilingual region also functions as an act of cross-border cultural proximity. The sources consulted do not report attendance figures: it is therefore not possible to establish whether the public crossing the border to see it is significant or marginal.

The schedule. Daily opening from 9 to 19, with no weekly closing day, indicates an organizational setup designed for the summer tourist flow and for the following autumn season. The closing date, October 25, places this exhibition among the few major exhibitions that extend beyond summer: during the same period, according to the review consulted, several major summer exhibitions remain open in Italy in Florence, Milan, Rome, Turin, Venice and Aosta, many of which, however, are closing precisely in these days.

The figure worth keeping in mind is the number of loans: 120 works by a single author, all from the same museum, away from their usual home from June 20 to October 25. The sources consulted do not indicate the distance covered or the costs of the operation. What remains is the scale of the insurance and logistical commitment involved in moving such a large block of a single-artist collection across the border, and the reason why similar operations are rarely repeated with the same holdings.