Plateau d'Assy & Its Modernist Church, Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce
Few travellers expect to find one of France's most extraordinary collections of 20th-century sacred art at 1,000 metres in the Alps, yet the church of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce on the Plateau d'Assy — the high village above Passy — contains original works by Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Jean Lurçat and Georges Rouault, all commissioned between 1937 and 1946.
The Art Inside
The mosaic façade by Léger — bold, primary-coloured and unmistakably modernist — greets you before you even open the door. Inside, Chagall's ceramic bas-relief of the Exodus glows on the north wall, while Lurçat's monumental tapestry of the Apocalypse covers the entire apse in deep blues and golds that shift with the mountain light filtering through Matisse's yellow ceramic tiles.
Rouault's stained-glass windows along the nave are among his finest late works — expressionist faces rendered in thick lead lines that turn the interior amber and crimson at midday. The whole ensemble was a deliberate post-war statement about art's power to restore the sacred.
The Plateau Itself
The Plateau d'Assy was a celebrated sanatorium resort in the early 20th century, and its wide sunny terrace at 1,000 m was considered therapeutic. The pine-scented air, the broad southern exposure and the unbroken view across to the Fiz cliffs still make it one of the most pleasant places to sit in the valley.
A short walk from the church leads to the old sanatorium buildings, now converted to residential use, and a viewpoint bench that looks straight down the Arve valley to Sallanches with Mont Blanc filling the sky to the south-east.
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