Lot 299 Dα

The work for the shimmering pool at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence is surely one of the best-known mosaics by George Braque. Like other important mosaics based on artists' designs, it was the work of the mosaicist Heidi Melano, who - together with her husband Lino Melano - achieved international distinction at that time, not least through their collaboration with other artists, such as Marc Chagall and Fernand Léger.
The present mosaic “Pélias et Nélée”, which was created posthumously by Heidi Melano, is a variation on one of Georges Braque's most famous motifs. In Greek mythology Pelias and Neleus were brothers - sons of Poseidon, god of the sea. The artist's eponymous gouache, which he had taken up again and repeated in 1963 in a final colour lithograph created before his death, served Heidi Melano as her design. Compositionally and stylistically these related works recall the ceiling painting that Georges Braque carried out in 1953/1955 for the Salle Henri II in the Louvre; they are a direct quotation of the ornamentally concentrated formula for a pair of birds on a blue ground.
In an interview at that time, Georges Braque mentioned how he had observed large birds in the vast sky above the Camargue: an incomparable experience that had touched him profoundly as an artist. Giving pictorial form to the birds' flight, in its free and unbound movement, would become a central artistic task in his late oeuvre. Braque had here found his way to an abstract composition that seems virtually emblematic.