The National Gallery of Art in Washington announced this week that it had received a bequest of 19th- and 20th-century works of art from Evelyn Stefansson Nef, an arts patron and writer who died in 2009.
Besides drawings and prints by Picasso, Kandinsky, Léger and Vuillard, the gift includes a monumental mosaic created by Marc Chagall that once adorned the garden of the Georgetown home where Ms. Nef lived with her husband, John Ulric Nef, an economic historian who died in 1988.
ARTKABINETT social network of fine art collectors will now have the opportunity to view the mosaic even if they never visited their Washington, D.C. home.
Chagall was a friend of the Nefs’, and in 1968 when he was visiting them he told the couple he wanted to make them an artwork. “But nothing for the house,” Chagall had said. “The house is perfect as it is. But I will do something for the garden. A mosaic.”
He ended up creating a mosaic consisting of 10 panels, each about 5 by 3 ½ feet, mounted on concrete backing, which was then installed on a wall in the Nefs’ garden.
The center of the composition depicts figures from Greek mythology: Orpheus with his lute, the Three Graces and Pegasus.
At the mosaic’s lower left, there is a scene of immigrants crossing the ocean to find a new life in the United States — a frequent Chagall theme — and at the lower right is a pair of lovers beneath a tree.
“It screams Chagall,” said Harry Cooper, the National Gallery’s curator of Modern and contemporary art. “When Evelyn asked Chagall if the couple in the mosaic were she and John, he is said to have replied, ‘If you like.’ ”
“Chagall was more comfortable working in stained glass,” Mr. Cooper added. “But he seems to have also been interested in mosaics.”
The mosaic is currently being treated by the National Gallery’s conservators. It is scheduled to be installed in the gallery’s sculpture garden in 2012.
Chagall met Mrs. Nef through her late husband, John Nef, and while staying at the Nefs' house in 1968, he declared his intention to create an artwork for them. Two days later, he said: "The house is perfect as it is. I will do something for the garden, a mosaic."
Three years later, the 10-by-17-foot mosaic was unveiled on a mild November evening. Embedded in a purpose-built brick wall, it is rich in mythological imagery juxtaposed with a New World skyline and huddled immigrants.
The symbolism was not lost on the former Evelyn Schwartz, whose parents were Hungarian Jews who immigrated to New York in the early years of the 20th century.
What began as a comfortable childhood went awry when her father died suddenly at 48, leaving a mentally fragile mother in a state of mute grief and unable to care for her four children.
"I remember how silent the house became -- the absence of people, the sudden cessation of music, noise and laughter," Ms. Nef wrote in her 2002 memoir, "Finding My Way: the Autobiography of an Optimist."
Ms. Nef overcame the emptiness of her childhood to become, in various incarnations, a puppeteer, an entertainer who could recall 1,000 songs, an expert on polar exploration, a psychotherapist and a benefactor of some of Washington's leading cultural institutions, including the National Symphony Orchestra, the Washington Opera and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
The Chagall mosaic, the only one of its kind in a private garden in the Western Hemisphere.
