Chagall’s was a religious, even mystical spirit for whom love was the force that bound together and moved everything in the universe, whose creatures and objects were part of a total motion without top or bottom, gravity or resistance – perfect for painting an opera ceiling!Įven more profoundly, Chagall was drawn to an ideal of total theatre. Chagall’s painting is, to borrow the word used by Guillaume Apollinaire when he first visited the artist’s studio at La Ruche in 1912, “super-natural” (this world would later be replaced by surrealist”), and so is Garnier’s enchanted palace. As readers will recall, “Olympus” was Garnier’s generic term for theatre ceilings.Ĭhagall was a lyric painter, and the correspondence, the sympathy linking his ceiling to Garnier’s building runs deeper that one might think. What’s more, Chagall evokes these composers through an “Olympus” of characters from their operas. It also introduces some major composers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including three from the relatively recent Russian school (unknown in France until Diaghilev’s time). It thus adds some of the architect’s contemporaries, such as Wagner and Berlioz who were “over-looked” in his iconographic programme (Verdi was the only living composer to be represented by a statue at the inauguration in 1875). When I came to France, I was struck by the shimmering colours, the play of light, and I found what I had been blindly groping for, this refinement of matter and uninhibited colour.” In Paris, “things, nature, people were lit up by this ‘light-freedom’ and seemed to bathe in a coloured bath.” Moreover, this ceiling completes the Palais Garnier’s “pantheon” of illustrious composers throughout the ages. Chagall’s own gift for colour is something he had discovered when he came to Paris: “In Russia everything is dark, brown, grey. Buren’s columns clearly continue the colonnade of the Galerie d’Orléans, even if they are truncated and striped and Chagall’s ceiling, while it incontestably breaks with the harmony of the auditorium, is, in many respects, in profound continuity with Garnier’s work (Chagall was an attentive reader of “Le Nouvel Opéra”).įirst of all, with his sharp, fresh hues – his “admirable prismatic colours” (André Breton) – Chagall continues and completes the reintroduction of colour, which was so important to Garnier. Pei’s pyramid certainly broke with the Renaissance and Napoleon III facades of the Louvre, but it echoes the obelisk on Place de la Concorde. Likewise, all three interventions brought an element of continuity as well as rupture. And that, it would seem, was Malraux’s main concern at the Opéra. Whatever one may think of their artistic merits, there is no denying that these three “gestures” were highly successful in terms of communication. And just as, thirty years later, Pei’s pyramid made the Louvre an international talking point: not that the museum was lacking in claims to fame, but this relatively marginal architectural intrusion ensured that the “Grand Louvre” programme got plenty of global media coverage. Just as, twenty years later, Buren’s columns put the spotlight on the Palais-Royal, which Parisians had totally forgotten, and were a great improvement on the car park that had dishonoured its courtyard for decades without anyone seeming to care. But then of course Garnier was no longer there to safeguard the unity of his palace of dreams.Ĭhagall’s ceiling did, without a doubt, make the Palais Garnier fashionable again. (That said, he would not remain there for long: less than two decades later, Lenepveu’s design was given the honours of the new Musée d’Orsay.) The action was sacrilegious, above all, with regard to Garnier’s principle of harmony, a principle observed by all the artists working under him, and even, to a certain degree, by Carpeaux. Was this an attempt to smash open the orderly but closed world created by Charles Garnier? A media coup at a time when the media were taking over the world.Īn act of sacrilege? Chagall’s painting now covered the work of another artist, who, like all the pompier (as the nineteenth century academic painters were known), was out of favour. And in fact, Malraux would follow up the year after and commission André Masson to do a ceiling for the Théâtre de l’Odéon. True, there was a recent precedent, the rather unsuccessful ceiling painted for the Louvre’s Salle Henri II by George Braque in 1952. In 1960, the Minister of Cultural Affairs André Malraux made what in those days was the bold as well as spectacular gesture of commissioning Marc Chagall to paint a new ceiling for the Opéra.
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