who painted the ceiling of the paris opera house

So everyone was happy and excited about having Chagall paint the ceiling?

Chagall, suspicious about orders, made sketches and models before finally accepting (voluntarily) this challenge, both because of his friendship with André Malraux and to pay tribute to the great composers who bring life to the Palais Garnier opera house.() So why was the ceiling replaced? Was it destroyed in some way? The story goes that apparently in 1960 when attending the premiere of Daphnis and Chloe, the ballet that Maurice Ravel performed at the Palais Garnier opera house with both the set and the costumes designed by Marc Chagall, the then Minister of Cultural Affairs, Andre Malraux, was somewhat bored and 'raised his eyes to the ceiling' and discovered the somewhat 'academic work' of Jules Lenepveu.ĭuring the intermission, André Malraux asked Marc Chagall (whom he admired for a long time and had known for thirty years) to design a new ceiling. It was entitled The Muses and the Hours of the Day and Night and this is what it looked like. The original ceiling was created in 1872 by Jules-Eugène Lenepveu.

(en.)īut today we are interested in this building because of our explorations into the artistic works of Marc Chagall who was commissioned in 1962 to paint a 'replacement ceiling'. Another contributing factor is that among the buildings constructed in Paris during the Second Empire, besides being the most expensive, it has been described as the only one that is 'unquestionably a masterpiece of the first rank.' This opinion is far from unanimous however: the 20th-century French architect Le Corbusier once described it as 'a lying art' and contended that the 'Garnier movement is a décor of the grave'. The Palais Garnier has been called 'probably the most famous opera house in the world, a symbol of Paris like Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, or the Sacré Coeur Basilica.' This is at least partly due to its use as the setting for Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel 'The Phantom of the Opera' and, especially, the novel's subsequent adaptations in films and the popular 1986 musical. The company now uses the Palais Garnier mainly for ballet. It was the primary theatre of the Paris Opera and its associated Paris Opera Ballet until 1989, when a new opera house, the Opéra Bastille, opened at the Place de la Bastille.

Who painted the ceiling of the paris opera house