The Lovers, Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation, Saint-Paul-de-Vence

Chagall designed The Lovers, his first architectural mosaic in collaboration with Lino Melano, for the Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. On July 28, 1964, André Malraux¹ inaugurated Europe’s first modern art foundation, modeled after the Barnes Foundation². It was born of Aimé and his wife Marguerite Maeght’s friendship with leading 20^th-century artists, including Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti and Marc Chagall.

Intended to adorn one of the foundation’s walls, the mosaic was part of a larger decorative plan in the gardens around Josep Lluís Sert's pure, bright buildings³. Sert reinterpreted the architecture of Mediterranean villages, featuring humble materials (brick, terracotta, and concrete) in a lush yet domesticated natural setting⁴ sublimated by art. Painters and sculptors collaborated with him to create works integrated into the building and garden, fostering a dialogue between art, architecture and nature. The Giacometti courtyard, Miró’s labyrinth, Chagall and Tal-Coat’s wall mosaics, Braque’s mosaic and stained-glass pool and Bury’s fountain create a sensory trail through the garden, allowing indoor and outdoor spaces to interact.

Minister of Culture André Malraux’s inaugural address paid tribute to Aimé Maeght’s trailblazing artistic, humanist vision. “This is not a museum”, he said. “When we looked at the patch of garden where the Mirós are, the same thing happened as when we looked at the room with the Chagalls. Those little horns reinvented by Miró, with their amazing dreamlike power, create a relationship with nature in your garden, in the sense of trees, that has never been seen before.⁵”.

The Lovers mosaic stretches across one of the foundation’s walls, opening out onto the sculpture garden and adjoining the present bookstore. With the painting Life (1964)⁶, it attests to Chagall’s friendship with Maeght and his monumental art’s presence at the foundation. Unique among his mosaics, The Lovers stands out for its spare style, crisp geometric shapes and harmonious use of primary colors. A 1964 pencil and watercolor sketch defined the composition and the placement of the future mosaic’s colored masses. In a smaller, undoubtedly earlier sketch, Chagall used fabric collages to indicate the distribution of forms and colors, suggested by vibrant geometric shapes that do not follow the outlines of the drawings of the figures. In a square format, a pair of lovers, their faces intertwined, occupy the center of the mosaic. In keeping with Maeght's desire for the mosaic to blend in with the landscape, colored areas (two red, two blue and one green) punctuate the white, grey and cream background, allowing trees and vegetation to show through. The red and green geometric shapes—lively accents suspended in mid-air—infuse the work with light and energy. The artist later used them in Preparatory Sketch for the Poems (Cramer) - I Live in My Life, Print XXIV (1968). The central green area, with its organic form and multiple shades of color, unfurls across the space like a carpet of vegetation, recalling the huge, velvety green space in The Lovers of Vence (1957)⁷. It later reappeared in Chagall’s project for the blooming garden stage set for The Magic Flute (1967)⁸.

Thoroughly Mediterranean in its luminosity and lush depiction of nature, this mosaic is a fine example of Melano’s craftsmanship⁹. Little documentation of the various stages involved in carrying out the project survives¹⁰. However, what is known is that Melano created material effects by accentuating the differences between stones and colored glass. They contrast with a light background in a distribution of the chromatic values developed some years later in The Large Sun, La Colline Villa, Saint-Paul-de-Vence [Le Grand Soleil, villa La Colline, Saint-Paul-de-Vence] (1965 - 1967)¹¹, the mosaic Chagall designed for his villa in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. A series of photographs¹² shows Chagall and Sert visiting the foundation’s construction site, probably in the winter of 1963-1964. In a letter to Chagall dated March 10, 1964¹³, Aimé Maeght wrote about his meeting with Lino Melano in Paris and the transmission to him of the artist’s guidelines for creating the mosaic: “He has established a range of colors based on your harmonies and glued them to a cardboard backing ... I am also sending you a box of mosaics that are similar to those on the cardboard, but in different materials.” Before the work began, a trial mosaic was made that seemed to follow the guidelines Chagall had given Melano in May 1964¹⁴, allowing him to test the cutting, positioning and chromatic values of the tesserae on the main character's face. Another series of photographs¹⁵ shows Chagall at the worksite with Lino and Heidi Melano working on the mosaic, setting the tesserae on the squared cement wall and looking at the preparatory model while the artist dabs some of the cement joints with a paintbrush. In a letter to Lino Melano dated August 3, 1964¹⁶, Chagall expressed his satisfaction with the mosaic but not with the change made to the color pink. The artist seems to have wanted the pink color, located in the rainbow shape as seen at the top of the sketch, to look more transparent and muted.