Nefs' Chagall Mosaic Makes It to The National Gallery of Art
The famous Chagall mosaic from a private garden on 28th Street NW has moved to the National Gallery of Art's Sculpture Garden. It was a three and a half year journey of epic challenge by a legion of conservators, mosaicists, carpenters, handlers, masons, engineers, and architects. Now installed in its new location in the National Sculpture Garden, the mosiac has been given a fresh and public incarnation, fittingly as a quiet monument to a woman who became the master of sparkling reinvention. Sitting sweetly in a sylvan corner of the scultpure garden near Ninth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Orphée speaks to Chagall's friendship with Evelyn Nef and her husband, John Nef, and to the avant-garde artist's lifelong exploration of surreal figures and disjointed mythical and sacred themes.