Marc CHAGALL creates stained glass windows for the city of Jerusalem.

Marc CHAGALL (1887.1985).

Typed letter signed to the academician and art historian René Huyghe.

One page in-4° on fine paper. Paris. March 24, 1961.

“I make large stained glass windows for Jerusalem. »

Chagall congratulated Huyghe on his entry into the Academy and informed him of his creation of stained glass windows for Jerusalem.

“Dear René Huygues [sic], I very much regretted not being at your party but I am still in Reims where I am making large stained glass windows for Jerusalem. However, I would like to wish you so many good things from afar: happiness, work, and of course congratulations. See you soon, I hope. Marc Chagall. »

During the years 1960 and 1961, Chagall created twelve stained glass windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah Hospital Center in Jerusalem. On this date, the Judeo-Russian painter had already designed two stained glass windows for the chapel of Assy and certain stained glass windows for the cathedral of Metz. He interrupted the Metz project to devote himself entirely to stained glass windows for Jerusalem; he will return there immediately after the Israeli construction site. Little studied in the historiography of modern stained glass art, this program has been mainly commented on by the Jewish community, and for good reason, the twelve stained glass windows for the Hadassah center synagogue are the only ones that Chagall created for a place of worship. Jewish. Thus, in the summer of 1961, Chagall exhibited the fruit of his work in Paris: the twelve stained glass windows designed for the synagogue of the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. The majority of these twelve stained glass windows will then be exhibited in New York in the fall of the same year, before the entire cycle is definitively sealed and inaugurated in Jerusalem in February 1962.

René Huyghe (1906.1997) was elected to the French Academy on June 2, 1960, in the chair of Robert Kemp by 15 votes to 10 for the novelist Paul Vialar. He was received in the great amphitheater of the Sorbonne on April 22, 1961.