The Four Seasons, First National Bank Plaza, Chicago

A few days after the Orpheus, home of John and Evelyn Nef, Washington, DC [Orphée, maison de John et Evelyn Nef, Washington DC] (1968 - 1971) mosaic was unveiled in the garden of Evelyn and John Nef’s Georgetown home on November 1, 1971, Eleanor Wood Prince sent Valentina Chagall a letter. “What a joy it was for me to see you again—you and the master at the John Nefs in Washington,” she wrote in French. “And what a wonderful mosaic the master made for them. It's so beautiful, I had tears in my eyes when I saw it. Thanks to Marc Chagall, there is great rejoicing in Washington! And now—let’s hope for the same rejoicing in Chicago!¹” In this letter, which refers for the first time to the project of a mosaic in Chicago, Mrs. Wood Prince asked Chagall if he would be available to make a “drawing”; in other words, to think about a model for a new monumental work.

The framework of the commission for the future mosaic quickly took shape in early 1972. William Wood Prince, president² of the First National Bank of Chicago from 1955 to 1987 and Mrs. Wood Prince’s husband, outlined the project in a letter dated February 8, 1972. It was to be a monument in prestigious First National Bank Plaza³ in honor of his adoptive father, Frederick H. Prince⁴. The mosaic, commissioned as a private initiative by the Wood Prince family and funded by the Prince Foundation⁵, was intended as a gift to the City of Chicago⁶. On a larger scale, the project was part of a movement in Chicago to sponsor modern urban art, especially in the city's business district, the Loop. The first large-scale work, Picasso's metal sculpture unveiled on Daley Plaza in 1967, was followed by Chagall’s The Four Seasons, Alexander Calder’s Bright red stabile Flamingo (1974) on Federal Plaza and Joan Miró’s statue The Sun, the Moon and a Star (1981) on Brunswick Plaza⁷.

Architect Carter H. Manny Jr., of the firm C. F. Murphy Associates, in collaboration with Perkins & Will Partnership, was in charge of the project. A student of Frank Lloyd Wright’s and Mies van der Rohe’s, Manny spent much of his career in Chicago. His major projects include the architectural design of Chicago's O'Hare International Airport (1957-late 1960s) and the FBI building in Washington, D.C. (1963-1975). He also designed the First National Bank of Chicago (1969) and the homonymous plaza on which Chagall’s mosaic would be installed⁸. In March 1972, Manny sent photographs of the first models of the plaza and many proposals for the shape of the reinforced concrete structure to house Chagall's work. “We are experimenting with various sizes and shapes of your work in mosaic,” he wrote⁹. Manny and his team expressed their preference for a cube-shaped structure¹⁰. Chagall opted for a large parallelepiped stretched lengthwise, which corresponded more closely to the square’s rectangular surface while leaving more room for pedestrians on either side of the mosaic by reducing its width to three meters instead of the six meters and nine centimeters of the cube proposed by the architects.

Chagall asked Lino Melano to make the mosaic, with whom he had collaborated since 1964¹¹. The contract¹² gave the Italian mosaicist, assisted by his Swiss colleague Michel Tharin, 12 to 18 months to complete the work under Chagall's direction. Tharin took over the project shortly after, in March 1973, an accidental fire at Melano's Biot studio badly damaged Chagall's models. Tharin continued the work in his Biot studio, closely supervised by Chagall¹³. Chagall often visited Melano to make changes and see to it that his instructions were being perfectly carried out, making corrections directly on the mosaic with red paint.

Blending a monumental work into the urban space of a city like Chicago raised many challenges. American art critic Emily Genauer said that while genius architects may have designed the buildings—Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—they are no less overwhelming and their originality does nothing to soften Chicago's “strident chaos” and intense energy¹⁴. "There was considerable skepticism when it was announced that Marc Chagall, the most delicate artist of the 20^th century, would create a wall mosaic in a square in Chicago's busiest and most hectic business district, in the very heart of the Loop ... How could this work not be dwarfed, if only by the huge mass of the First National Bank, which dominates the square with its sixty setback stories?¹⁵” In response to the neighborhood’s lively pace, Chagall seems to have wanted to foster a quiet, joyful mood by depicting the intertwining cycles of human life and nature. The artist proposed the theme of the Four Seasons, which he saw as the “symbol of our existence and eternity”. "I chose the Four Seasons theme for the mosaic because I imagined many people bustling about in this Chicago square in the city center. In my mind the Four Seasons represent human life itself, physical and moral, in its various stages ... I hope the people of Chicago will feel the same emotion as I did while working on it.¹⁶”

The work was designed to be read uninterruptedly in a clockwise direction. The western part depicts, from right to left, spring and summer. Spring, Chagall said¹⁷, symbolizes the beginning of life, with all its hopes and joys. Depicted as predominantly blue, like the rising sun’s first rays shining across morning dew sparkling with a myriad of colors, spring celebrates the awakening of nature and love¹⁸. The viewer sees a shepherd taking his flock to pasture early in the morning, domestic animals and small birds streaking across the sky, musicians playing instruments, figures dancing and loving couples holding flowers. Summer is a hymn to the sun, according to Chagall: "Men reap the fruits of their hard labor; harvest time is accompanied by singing and dancing.¹⁹” The sun, like a flower with petals, spreads a soft pink light that bathes the scene in a host of warm hues. On the left, a few skyscrapers evoke the city of Chicago, while on the right, people are busy harvesting green bales and carrying sheaves of golden wheat. The eastern part features autumn and winter. Autumn, with its orange and amber light, portrays the joys of the harvest after the summer's labors: a man presses grapes in a barrel and baskets of fruit lie about. "The last blessing before the long winter sleep appears from the sky like an offering, a vision.²⁰” In the section dedicated to winter, the sun goes down and the tree on the right has lost its leaves. Men gather to celebrate the winter holidays, “hoping for the resurrection of spring²¹”. Lake Michigan appears in the autumn, winter and spring scenes. The sides of the large mosaics depict subtle transitions between the seasons. The top of the construction features a rainbow that was visible from the surrounding skyscrapers until 1994, when a glass canopy was built to protect the mosaic from the elements.

The Four Seasons is Chagall's largest mosaic: 270 square meters and 128 panels²². A plethora of chromatic nuances in the tiny tesserae contrast with the work’s monumental scale. Hundreds of tons of stones and glass with 350²³ different colors were ordered from around the world. The panels were made in Biot, shipped to Chicago and assembled in mosaic on a parallelepiped structure in the summer of 1974 by Michel Tharin assisted by his wife Claude Tharin, Alain Devy and technical crews from C. F. Murphy Associates and Perkins & Will Partnership. In mid-September, Chagall arrived in Chicago to add the finishing touches²⁴ and approve the final work. On September 27, 1974, the mosaic was unveiled²⁵ to Chicagoans during a grand ceremony: “Observers said that everybody in Chicago must have taken part in the event, which magically turned the city’s residents into extras in a gigantic cast worthy of Hollywood’s Golden Age.²⁶”

This was not Chagall's only work in Chicago. The resounding success of The Four Seasons led to another commission: three large stained-glass windows at the Art Institute of Chicago (1976-1979) combining symbols of American history, Chicago's iconic skyline and the arts.