Marc Chagall’s legacy is often associated with his vibrant paintings and poetic use of color, yet his creativity reached far beyond the boundaries of the canvas. Over the course of his long career, Chagall experimented with a wide range of mediums—stained glass, stage design, monumental murals, book illustration, and even sculpture. Each of these avenues allowed him to translate his unique visual language into new forms, enriching both private and public spaces and engaging audiences across cultures and generations.

Marc Chagall’s stained glass windows represent one of the most remarkable intersections of modern art and spiritual tradition. Unlike painters who remained tied to the canvas, Chagall embraced the challenge of transforming architectural spaces into immersive artworks. His luminous windows at the Reims Cathedral shimmer with blues, reds, and yellows that shift with the daylight, creating a sense of perpetual movement. In the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, he designed twelve monumental windows symbolizing the twelve tribes of Israel, weaving together Jewish heritage with universal messages of hope and renewal. Through stained glass, Chagall discovered a medium where light itself became the pigment, enabling him to express the transcendence, mystery, and vitality that defined his visual universe. These works not only enriched religious and civic spaces but also extended his art to a broader audience who experienced them as part of daily life.

The stage offered Chagall a completely different canvas—one alive with motion, music, and performance. His set and costume designs for the New York Metropolitan Opera’s 1967 production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute stand as a landmark in the history of stage design. Chagall’s vision infused the opera with a dreamlike, fantastical atmosphere: radiant costumes adorned with bold colors and whimsical motifs, and backdrops that evoked floating figures, mythical creatures, and landscapes suspended between earth and sky. These elements did more than provide decoration; they animated the performance with Chagall’s distinctive poetic spirit, allowing opera-goers to step into a world where art and music intertwined. His theatrical contributions highlight his versatility, proving that his creativity thrived not only on the flat surface of a canvas but also in the dynamic, ephemeral space of live performance.

Chagall consistently sought ways to move art beyond the private sphere of galleries and collectors into the public realm, where it could speak to people across all walks of life. His monumental ceiling painting at the Paris Opéra Garnier, unveiled in 1964, is perhaps the most iconic example. There, he reimagined the great composers—Mozart, Wagner, Berlioz, and others—through a kaleidoscope of vibrant imagery that hovers above audiences, transforming their experience of the opera house itself. In Chicago, his mosaic The Four Seasons covers an entire plaza, wrapping daily urban life in scenes filled with animals, lovers, and folkloric symbols. Chagall also painted murals for the United Nations and other civic institutions, embedding his distinctive dreamlike imagery into public consciousness. These commissions reflect not just his mastery of scale and composition but also his democratic vision of art as something to be lived with and shared.

While his monumental works dazzled the public, Chagall’s illustrated books reveal a more intimate, delicate side of his creativity. His etchings for the Bible, commissioned by the visionary art dealer Ambroise Vollard in the 1930s, demonstrate both reverence for sacred texts and freedom of imagination. Each plate weaves together biblical narrative with folkloric vitality—angels, prophets, and patriarchs rendered with a tenderness that transcends dogma. In contrast, his illustrations for La Fontaine’s Fables brim with humor, wit, and earthy vitality, capturing the mischievous spirit of the tales with whimsical animals and rustic scenes. The smaller scale of these works allowed Chagall to explore the precision of line, the playfulness of gesture, and the intimacy of the printed page. It is precisely this dimension of Chagall’s art—his etchings and illustrations—that our current exhibition foregrounds, inviting visitors to explore how his narrative imagination thrived in graphic form, bridging literature, myth, and image. These various etchings will continue to be available for purchase through the gallery once the exhibition closes up.

Marc Chagall's sculpture has remained an important but lesser-known part of his practice. After moving to Vence in 1949, he began modelling ceramics and carving stone, later experimenting with bronze at the Susse foundry where he approached patina and relief with the eye of a painter and engraver. Over three decades, Chagall created nearly a hundred sculptural works that explored themes of love, biblical narratives, and animals, from engraved stones and copper reliefs to funerary monuments. His pieces reveal influences ranging from prehistoric objects and medieval capitals to Russian folklore, while his sense of spatiality extended into architectural projects such as works for the church of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce in Assy and for Ira Kostelitz’s Parisian mansion. Sculpture not only broadened Chagall’s artistic vocabulary but also enriched and renewed his approach to painting, engraving, and other media.

Marc Chagall’s oeuvre defies categorization precisely because he never confined himself to one medium or tradition. Whether illuminating sacred spaces with stained glass, transforming the stage with dreamlike sets, or carving stone with the hands of a sculptor, Chagall continually reinvented his artistic language while remaining faithful to his themes of love, faith, memory, and imagination. By exploring his work beyond the canvas, we gain a fuller appreciation of the breadth of his creativity and the depth of his vision—one that still resonates across art, architecture, literature, and performance today. In particular, the lithographs and etchings by Chagall, which will continue to be available once the exhibition at Galerie de Buci is finished, highlight his connection to spirituality and reflect a deep sense of humanity within this extraordinarily prolific artist.