Marc Chagall

February last year four of us went to Nice, and we visited the Marc Chagall museum. We walked from our hotel, and up the hill near the flyover. Presumably there is a car park, but from the gate we went in we saw a garden, ticket office and shop to the left, a conservatory housing a cafe to the right, and the single storey museum ahead.
The museum houses three major collections, a biblical series, and two on the Song of Solomon, one by Chagall, and one by another artist.  We looked at the biblical scenes first, and that is what I recall most. There is also a cinema showing a film about the artist, that did not hold my attention, as it was in French. Along the side there is a big stained glass window, and there are three sets of sketches he made in designing them.
The first painting in the biblical collection is Abraham, and that is the one I remember most vividly.  It shares many of the features found in the other paintings.
The first thing I noticed was the scale. These are large paintings filling up large sections of wall.  Each one hung in its own section of wall, and was very imposing.
There are broad blocks of vibrant colour, the angels are blue, with white wings, all against a red background. Other paintings had broad blocks of colour. One of the garden of Eden was largely green, with a bright bush of with lots of bright colours, and the one of the flood was unusual for having mainly brown.
Line was an important part of each composition. The angels sat at a horizontal table, and their wings made fairly vertical lines, while a separate scene off the the top right was separated by wide arc.  Other paintings were notable for their juxtaposition of straight and curved lines at different angles.
Another thing that impressed me was the texture. Large blocks of the Abraham painting were red background, but none of it was plain red. The whole area was a rich mixture of brushstrokes, giving a vivid interest without detracting from the characters in the painting.
It was a feature of many of the paintings to have smaller subsidiary scenes tucked away in part of the canvas. Sometimes this was another episode from the same story, in others, it was images from elsewhere or recent past.  Another feature was rather strange fanciful animals that filled up parts of the canvas.
By the end we had become quite familiar with his style, and can often recognise his paintings when we meet them somewhere else now.
My recollection of the Song of Solomon series was that they were generally lighter and brighter, with pale or white backgrounds.
We ended the visit with some lunch in the cafe, which we ate at one of the tables out on the grass.  Here we took some pictures of the palms growing, which proved almost as inspirational as the museum.
So, there it is. It has taken me eighteen months to write it, but I guess it is easier to write more succinctly looking back than nearer the time.