The Bird Musician

In the postwar period, Marc Chagall was a recognized artist who received many commissions for monumental decorative projects and experimented with new media. After ceramics, tapestry, stained glass and painting, he embraced an ancestral Mediterranean technique: mosaic. In the summer of 1963, Chagall undertook a search for a mosaicist who could transpose his projects on an architectural scale. He began with the Gruppo Mosaicisti, who, in 1958, were the first to create a mosaic from one of his works. He wrote to Giuseppe Bovini, director of the national museum of Ravenna¹, but also turned to artist Gino Severini. Severini gave Chagall very specific advice², warning him about the hurdles involved in importing a mosaic from Italy to France.
He recommended several mosaicists, especially Lino Melano, who had been living in France since 1953. Trusting Severini’s advice, Chagall contacted Melano³, whose work on the façade of the Fernand Léger Museum in Biot he had seen when it was inaugurated in 1960. Chagall admired the vibrancy of the 400m² mosaic made up of large, protruding tesserae with varied inclinations, boldly transcribing Léger's contrasting shapes and powerful flat colors.

The archives have no trace of the beginnings of Chagall and Melano’s relationship, but it can be surmised that The Bird Musician was a test that the mosaicist had to pass before being considered for future collaborative projects. By asking him to create a trial piece, Chagall could assess Melano's ability to adapt to his own fluid, vibrant style, where nuance and delicate colors reign supreme.

The drawing used as the model has not been found, but it is known from two reproductions attesting to two successive states of advancement. The first, dated 1948, was reproduced in Frantz Meyer’s 1961 book⁴ Profile, or Man with Bird [Le Profil ou L'Homme à l'oiseau] (1948). The India ink drawing shows a bearded man on the left watching a bird energetically take flight with a violin in its hand. The second, known from a photograph belonging to the Maeght Gallery, is enhanced by many features executed in wash: small wooden houses recalling Vitebsk, details on the bearded man’s face, including a female silhouette now clearly outlined, and new details on the bird and in the sky shaded by large areas of differentiated values.

An observation of the mosaic reveals that Melano used the second drawing as the model. The mosaicist only took the part on the right: the bird with outstretched wings soaring skyward and holding a violin, which he interpreted in a narrow range of colors brought to life by subtle shades. Melano faithfully transcribed Chagall’s hues in natural stones with a palette ranging from the bright white of the bird's plumage to a black ring. To avoid illusionistic precision, the tesserae were unevenly cut and irregularly inclined, resulting in a more shimmering surface. A black net made up of very fine rectangular tesserae stresses the bird's outline, all the more visible for being underlined by parallel rows of tesserae in a different color. Mosaic allowed Chagall to vividly express his art of giving rhythm to his paintings’ backgrounds. In this technique, motifs blend into a rich, lively background by a play of parallel lines that follow in their wake before gradually fading into a blur. This is called andamento. Later, Chagall and Melano often used light-colored marble and stones to create flowing lines that breathe movement into the whole. These ethereal backgrounds set off the figures, which are defined by the shiny or matte glass and enamel’s dazzling colors, sometimes underscored by a partial black line specifying a detail, in this case the bird's plumage and eye. This simple highlight can also become a graphic notation punctuating the surface, as in the tree in The Happy Party, home of Jean-Paul Binet, Saint-Paul-de-Vence [La Fête heureuse, maison de Jean-Paul Binet, Saint-Paul-de-Vence] (1971 - 1972) (“The Happy Party”).

The modest, touching test mosaic attests to the connection between an artist, Marc Chagall, driven by a desire for color and monumentality, and a craftsman, Lino Melano, who turned his glass and stone dreams into reality. Like a sensitive plate, it captured the bond between two complementary personalities and marked the start of a working relationship as well as a fertile, lasting friendship. Over the next ten years, from 1964 to 1974, Chagall, Melano and his wife Heidi completed nine landmark projects together, collaborating closely in their studios on the Côte d'Azur, at La Ruche in Paris and on sites in France and abroad.