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Magic Flutist. By far his most thrilling public work was the commission, assigned him by France's Minister of Culture André Malraux, to redecorate the ceiling at the Paris Opera. This vast pantheon to music swirls with 2,153 sq. ft. of ballet dancers, firebirds and blossoms banked like clouds in hot Midi colors that triumph over the surrounding Second Empire gilt moldings (TIME, Nov. 6). In the mural he painted the face of his old friend Malraux—the gesture of a Renaissance artist paying homage to his patron. But as a grateful adopted son of France, Chagall made a truly princely gesture: he presented the ceiling, a year's labor, to France as a gift. Without fanfare, Chagall often turns up at opera performances, whips out a spyglass to study his masterpiece furtively.
Now he has turned to another opera house. For New York's new Metropolitan at the Lincoln Center, he is designing more than 75 costumes and 13 sets for its forthcoming production of Mozart's The Magic Flute. And when the Met opens in 1966, its facade will boast a brace of 30-ft. by 35-ft. murals, swarming with the turbulent will-o'-the-wisps of his own endless fantasy. From their vantage on the Met's grand tier, the over-two-story-high murals will glow through the glassed vaults to dominate a city vista more spacious than the Piazza San Marco in Venice.
Icons of Youth. Such magnificence is a far cry from the provincial Russian ghetto town of Vitebsk in which Chagall grew up, the eldest among eight sisters and one brother. To support the family, his father manhandled herring barrels for a livelihood. Life was harsh in Vitebsk, but he remembers his father, who changed his name from Segal to Chagal (Marc added the second l for euphony in French), as a good provider, a "simple heart, poetic and muted." Sheltered by the Jewish commandment against graven images, the young dreamer never saw so much as a drawing until, one day, he watched a schoolmate copying a magazine illustration. When he was ridiculed for his astonishment, "it roused a hyena in me," and he began copying and improvising from magazines.
The Russian icon with its blank-eyed stare and stiff frontal figures was, next to shop signs, the art he knew best. Those Eastern images lean away from pictorial realism toward symbolism, and he loved them, as he says, because they are both "magical and unreal."