Marc Chagall
Chagall kept a studio flat inside the gated Villa Montmorency estate in Auteuil in the mid-1930s, with his wife Bella.
Villa Montmorency
Still standing
Outside only
Someone else
The private gated estate in Auteuil, laid out on the grounds of an eighteenth-century château, where Marc Chagall kept a studio in the mid-1930s before the war forced him out of France.
- Villa Montmorency, 75016 Paris
- Chagall kept a studio flat here in the mid-1930s
The place, briefly
Villa Montmorency is not a villa but a private estate: a grid of leafy lanes in Auteuil, built on the former grounds of a château, gated and guarded and effectively invisible from the surrounding streets. It has been among the most expensive addresses in Paris since the nineteenth century.
Marc Chagall kept a studio flat inside it in the mid-1930s, with his wife Bella. The Musée Chagall's own record of his studios notes that both his Paris-period workspaces of this decade were built around a large bay window — the same preoccupation with light that runs through the late work.
It is worth setting this beside La Ruche again. Twenty years separate a shared rotunda where painters burned furniture for heat from a guarded estate in Auteuil. Very few careers in this Atlas cover that distance, and Chagall covered it while remaining, in the eyes of the French state under the Occupation, a foreign Jew whose position was not secure at all.
The estate is closed. The record exists because he worked there, not because anyone can see it.
Key facts
- A private, gated residential estate in Auteuil
- Kept a studio flat here in the mid-1930s, with Bella
- Both his 1930s Paris workspaces were built around a large bay window
- Gated and private — not visitable
Timeline
Chagall works in a studio flat inside Villa Montmorency.
He leaves occupied France for New York.
On the map
Questions before you go
Can you go into Villa Montmorency?
No. It is a private gated estate with its own security, and the lanes are not public.
People who knew this place
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