Two years ago, US Ambassador Arnold Saltzman, the founding president and current executive vice president of Nassau County Museum of Art, proposed a highly ambitious undertaking †an exhibition that would make the museum’s galleries a treasure house of works by Marc Chagall.
Constance Schwartz, the museum’s former director, was enlisted to organize an extraordinary exhibition of Chagall’s work, more extensive than any other previously seen in this area, and including paintings being shown to the Long Island public for the first time.
Saltzman and Schwartz reached out for important loans from the many collectors, galleries and museums that they had established relationships with over the years. These efforts have resulted in “Marc Chagall,” an exhibition that features paintings and a selection from Chagall’s series of 105 hand colored etchings of Bible stories that he produced in 1957. These etchings have never before been seen on Long Island.
The exhibition opens July 21 and remains on view through November 4.
The works selected for the exhibition demonstrate how Chagall, throughout a long and distinguished career, incorporated facets of his early Russian Jewish heritage into multilayered works. Chagall’s storytelling paintings portray a fantastic pictorial world where heaven and earth seem to meet, and couples are always in love. It is a world where people and animals †cows, goats, donkeys, horses and birds †float upside down or sideways, irrespective of the laws of gravity.
Chagall’s hypersensitive imagination is palpable as he shares with the viewer his memories of family in brilliantly colored works set amid the houses and streets of his native Vitebsk.
The Bible etchings on view are on loan from the Haggerty Art Museum of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis.
Nassau County Museum of Art is at 1 Museum Drive. For information, 516-484-9337 or www.nassaumuseum.org .
