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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