The sun’s beginning to lazily drift down in Saint Paul de Vence when my tour guide casually mentions that Marc Chagall is buried here, in this unassuming French medieval town 12km west of Nice. We’re standing on the parapets of the walls, gazing down at the cemetery, and she happens to point down at a plot where a man and a woman are standing, holding something in their hands. “That’s his grave,” she says, and then sees my expression. “Do you want to… go see it?”
It’s a simple grave. There are no visible signs at the front of the cemetery, nothing here to signify that one of the greatest artists of the 20th century was laid to rest here at the age of 98. Chagall was a giant of European Modernism, with his work heavily influenced by Jewish traditions.
Born in Belarus to a traditional Jewish family, Chagall was witness to almost a century of world events: the Russian Revolution (and the end of the tsars), two World Wars, and the Cold War. During WWII, he went into exile in the U.S., before returning to Paris in 1948 and then to the Riviera in 1949.
In 1966, Chagall and his wife built and settled down in a house in Saint-Paul’s countryside. Here, he worked on his commissions, unwound and painted visual odes to love: couples set against blue skies, surrounded by birds and flowers. He remained here until his death in 1985. To give you an idea of how respected he was, his funeral consisted of a handful of family members, close friends, and diplomats of three nations (the Soviet Union, France, and Israel).
It is not hard to imagine why he might have wanted to stay, at the very end, in a place that gave him such joy—overlooking the Mediterranean, listening to the birdsong at dusk, the sweet scent of spring flowers lingering in the air.
Chagall’s tomb, as part of Russian and Jewish tradition, is scattered with small stones. For a moment, it feels like we are holding our breath in the face of such history. It is one thing to know everything Chagall did and painted and made, but it is another momentous, heavy thing, to then come to his grave and look at all the lives he touched and changed and impacted, represented in small pebbles. A rather fitting symbol of the permanence of legacy and memory for such a giant of an artist.
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