The Winter Garden,

In 1964, the same year the Maeght Foundation opened in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Chagall received his first monumental private commission when his friend Ira Kostelitz asked the Russian-born French artist to create a mosaic for the courtyard of her Paris home at 8 rue de l'Élysée, on what is now a private lane lined by small, late 19^th-century English-style terraced houses running alongside France's executive mansion.

Given its decorative nature, Chagall called the mosaic The Winter Garden¹. It graces three sides of a stone courtyard. The fourth side is a set of French doors opening into a formal dining room featuring a group of oils-on-canvas Chagall specially created for the space. They were hung on opposite sides of the walls, echoing each other on high period wainscoting. One, View of Place de la Concorde (Paris Landscape, 1968) was flanked by two great Biblical figures, King David (1961-1963) and Bathsheba (1965). Two small, original, snow-white marble sculptures by Chagall, Bird and Fish (1964-1966), stand on the edge of a fine reflecting pool. Carved as fountains, they accent the center of the courtyard on the ground, framed by blue-grey marble paving also designed by the artist.

Born in 1913 to a wealthy, well-established Moscow family, Ira Sachse was the daughter of Elena Gerasimova and Robert Sachse. In Paris, where she lived for over a half-century, Ira was a well-connected collector and a discerning bibliophile who always made original, astute choices. She rubbed shoulders with many artists, art critics, dealers, writers and poets, but was particularly close to Marc and Valentina Chagall in the mid-1960s.

Discerning connoisseurs have always commissioned art works. However, the tastes of the time did not run towards the large-scale public works projects that today contribute to the prestige of Paris. As a patron of the arts, Ira was well ahead of her time and instinctively drawn to modernity. She had a long-standing, unbounded admiration for Chagall’s art long before his reputation was firmly established. Well ahead of his time, in the 1920s her father acquired a work that he hung on the central staircase of their Berlin townhouse, where they moved after the Bolshevik revolution.

In the 1960s, Ira began a lasting friendship with Chagall and his last wife Vava, with whom, in addition to her native language, she shared a passion for painting, music and poetry. Ira visited Vence and Quai d'Anjou; the Kostelitzes hosted dinners with Michel Brodsky, Vava's brother, and Ida Chagall, the painter's daughter; and Slavic culture permeated their discussions. This all was part of a consummate art of conversation that Ira conducted in several languages with equal parts charm and subtlety. There is no doubt that their first meetings were skillfully organized by Marguerite and Aimé Maeght, who sold the Kostelitzes a number of high-quality art works by Alberto Giacometti, Chagall, Alexander Calder, Vassily Kandinsky and Antoni Tapiès and commissioned a beautiful slate fireplace by Raoul Ubac.

Chagall's first monumental decoration came at the request of Father Marie-Alain Couturier, the driving force behind the postwar revival of sacred art in France. It was for architect Maurice Novarina’s Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce church in Assy (created in 1956 at the Madoura workshop in Vallauris and installed the following year), some 60 kilometers from Martigny. Chagall suggested a large-scale ceramic for the baptistery, The Crossing of the Red Sea (1956), accompanied by tall rectangular windows painted in perfectly matching colors.

His engagement with architecture led him to master the highly complex technique of stained glass. With help from the eminent Reims artisans Charles Marq and his wife Brigitte Simon, he soon gained a reputation as the 20th century’s leading stained glass designer. He was passionate about the renewal of wall decoration. This is when he began experimenting with mosaic. The influence of his travels to the Holy Land (1951), Greece and Italy (1952 and 1954) cannot be emphasized enough. There he discovered the most resplendent examples of mosaic, a millennia-old art form presided over by the muses (musivum opus). The words his friend André Malraux wrote in The Voices of Silence (1951) could not ring truer: “The fresco was then the poor man's mosaic; but the mosaic, the mother of stained glass, was not the privileged means of expression of Christian art because of the wealth it displays. By its attitude it suggests the sacred.²” Don't these words reflect Chagall’s personal artistic and visual preoccupations, both literally and figuratively?

After The Blue Rooster (1959)³, Chagall’s first important mosaic was commissioned by Marguerite and Aimé Maeght for their eponymous foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence: The Lovers⁴. It was opened to the public in 1964. After talking the matter over with Chagall, Ira Kostelitz asked him to carry out a special private commission for the inner courtyard of her mansion on rue de l'Élysée.

The backlit stone space, with neither interest nor sunlight and too small to grow anything, prompted Chagall to design a decor conducive to daydreaming that would evoke the Garden of Eden and the Garden of Delights at the same time. It would become a Winter Garden. After numerous conversations, he made a large watercolor in the site’s exact proportions, over which he then plotted a grid to allow for enlargement. A royal phoenix in the center and a majestic peacock impudently turning its back perch atop delicate, lush green branches blossoming with indigo and madder, rustling like fireworks amid the tendrils of fanciful birds in flight. Standing out against an airy, pink-edged white background, they are watched over from the heavens by a powerful effigy of the sun placed where a self-portrait of the painter smiles.

Chagall finished the preparatory cartoon for Winter Garden in 1965 and chose Lino Melano to interpret it. Given the project’s outsized scale, it took Lino and Heidi Melano over a year of challenging work to complete the mosaic in their studio at La Ruche⁵, near the Vaugirard abattoirs in Paris. The courtyard features a highly personal decor: The artist wanted to offer his friend and client a light-hearted, cheerful piece of lyrical bravura for the pleasure of the eye. Its unique sense of intimacy in his body of work attests to their close relationship. For this Parisian haven Chagall chose ivory tones alternating with the Mediterranean light in which he usually bathed the majestic, contrasting compositions he carried out in the South of France. The motifs’ order and placement recall his previous experiments with the most memorable sets he designed for the theater, opera and ballet (Aleko, 1942; Daphnis and Chloe, 1958; The Magic Flute, 1964). This is a far cry from the legendary evocations of his native Russia that might be expected in one of his compatriots’ homes, or the biblical stories that kept him busy during this period, when he completed the large paintings for the future Marc Chagall Biblical Message National Museum.

The lightness of the design and the generous nobility of the movement shimmer on the skin of this oversized mosaic composed of painstakingly selected stone fragments. Chagall paid Melano visits on a regular basis throughout the process, quietly observing, making changes, stressing a particular feature here, emphasizing a specific tone there. To the symphony of tesserae he added stones brought back from Israel and glass pastes chosen in Italy, each precisely cut by the mosaicist one at a time. He was a demanding project manager until the 22 large grouted panels making up the whole were completely installed. The painter took a back seat to the decorator. The mineral irregularity of the patiently, delicately juxtaposed fine tesserae, the flower that seems to quiver on the courtyard’s new skin and the ever-changing play of slanting light are the hallmarks of a perfectly fulfilled chromatic and artistic vision brought to life by the lyrical, almost singing inventiveness he had hoped his interpreters would achieve.

The two fountain sculptures, Fish and Bird, serve as counterpoints to the small rectangular pool that Chagall designed for the center of the courtyard. They are not only recurring themes in his paintings, but also among the most popular motifs in his sculptural work. Their proportions and the chiseled, micaceous, white Veneto marble they are made of make these in-the-round sculptures perfectly suited to this paradisiacal setting. Their spotless matte marble surface scintillates with rare opalescent phosphorescence. They are among Chagall’s few stone sculptures, a medium in which he began working in 1951—first with bas-reliefs, then figures in the round—and continued in the Alpes-Maritimes until about 1968. Attentive to every detail, Chagall also designed the layout of the courtyard’s informal paving stones, which were specially cut from blue marble quarried in Savoy and bordered with wide white joints recalling the ribs of his stained glass windows.

In keeping with Georges Kostelitz’s wishes, the Chagall Courtyard now graces the Pierre Gianadda Foundation sculpture park. On September 10, 2001, it was gifted to Léonard and Annette Gianadda for the world-famous institution Léonard Gianadda founded in 1977.

After a difficult detachment from its original walls and a painstaking restoration by Heidi Melano and Benoît and Sandrine Coignard, the mosaic was identically and permanently reinstalled by Gianadda in the foundation’s park. It opened to the public on November 19, 2003, the date of the foundation’s 25^th anniversary, with Annette Gianadda, Georges Kostelitz and Meret Meyer in attendance. This outstanding achievement now belongs to Chagall's universal heritage.