The Large Sun, La Colline Villa, Saint-Paul-de-Vence

“The general, silent rotation of the world¹”

In late June and early July 1966, Marc and Valentina Chagall moved to a large house on a wooded hill in the Gardettes quarter of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, near the Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation. For the first time in his life, at nearly 80, the artist could imagine owning the place where he lived and worked. While still living at Les Collines, in Vence, the couple had asked Russian-born French architect André Svetchine² to design their new home, presumably on the recommendations of Aimé and Marguerite Maeght³ and other acquaintances, including Nadia Léger⁴.

The large building was constructed between 1964 and 1966 on a rock-supported platform known as “La Colline” overlooking surplus land to the south. It comprises three sections of unequal size stretching east to west. The largest areas were set aside for work. They included a spacious studio with a large bay window for the production and storage of monumental pieces, a print workshop, a sculpture studio and smaller storage rooms. In the center, bright, spacious living and reception areas with large paintings on the walls opened out onto a covered terrace in the garden. On one side of the covered terrace, where meals were served, a mosaic was installed on an outdoor wall separating the living and working areas.

In a letter to Lino Melano dated August 7, 1965, Chagall requested photographs of the mosaic being installed in the Parisian home of Ira and Georges Kostelitz⁵ because he and his wife were concerned about the work’s progress. He added, "I would also like to tell you about a small mosaic I'm thinking about for my new home in Saint-Paul.⁶” It is known with certainty that the Colline mosaic was unfinished when the Chagalls moved to Saint-Paul-de-Vence: on November 15, 1966, the artist wrote to Melano that "Mrs. Chagall is a little worried about her mosaic. Are you planning to come here and could we see you? If you do come, we could talk about it in front of the wall.⁷”. Melano replied the next day, on November 16, 1966. “I can assure you,” he wrote, “that we’d be much happier working at your home in St. Paul, but we’re busy with work here until around December 15. You can reassure Mrs. Chagall that we haven't forgotten about her mosaic at all.⁸”.

To Chagall it was an obvious, natural choice for the mosaic he designed for an outdoor wall of his home⁹, surrounded by Mediterranean nature, brush and olive trees, to feature a symbolic, monumental sun with nine rays emerging from two concentric circles signifying the radiation of solar energy or even the sun's corona. The sun is a part of Mediterranean culture, while the rays echo the nine candles of the menorah that are lit one night at a time during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Chagall's depiction of the sun, far from a scientific rendering, with an eruption emblazoned by tongues of flame, may symbolize the dawn of a new stage in his life as an artist, its soft light meant to dispel or ward off any future darkness. This imaginary sun shines not with a monochrome surface, but with highlights or accents of various geometric shapes and colors, bathing the sky and background in muted, musically balanced hues. To emphasize the expression of earthly life, which depends on our source of light, Chagall dedicated the elongated silhouette on a red background in the lower left-hand corner, the animal profiles on the green background in the upper right-hand corner, the intertwined lovers between two sunbeams, the Tree of Life in the lower right-hand corner and the shofar player, who seems as though the outline of the middle of the sun or the pistil nestling in the heart of a flower’s abundant petals is lulling him to sleep, to the village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence¹⁰.

To date, it is hard to say which preparatory model Chagall gave Melano in 1966, but it can be surmised that at first, it must have been the stylized one, created entirely with collages of fabric and paper highlighted with ink and graphite on paper. The other model, primarily featuring painted elements in gouache, ink and graphite, combined with some rare fabrics glued to a light gridded background, gave the mosaicist additional information. In this second model, Chagall focused on details, i.e. the composition to be made out, from the geometric shapes to the collage effects. The white gouache highlights the areas where lighter tesserae were to be used for the mosaic.

In the late 1910s, Chagall was already using collage in his designs for Yiddish theater costumes in Russia, but the technique’s reappearance during his exile in the United States¹¹ heralded a new direction. In this mosaic, the collage elements are more than just instructions for the craftsman; they are the basis of the composition itself¹². Melano used different kinds of tesserae to translate the model into the mosaic. Those represented by the collage are made of thick, thin, opaque, transparent or differently colored glass paste. They stand out from the clear background, designed in a host of different shades and textures. He hand-cut each piece to the desired orientation, shape and size, including the height, for some of them protrude from the mosaic’s surface. Each has an active role in a continuously moving spatial composition, reflecting the sun's play of light and shadow throughout the day. An orchestration of tesserae variations structures The Large Sun, a mosaic imbued with eternal light on an outside wall of Chagall's house. They become actors, musicians and dancers all at once, continuously fostering a new dialogue with the surrounding nature, which the artist chose to nurture and protect in the ultimate work created in his studio as well as in his personal life.

Being at one with the wall, the mosaic had become an integral part of the house¹³. This creation was all the more essential in that, like all of Chagall’s work, it materializes the perpetual struggle against a status that was his for too long: “Happy the man who has no homeland.¹⁴”.