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Train station in Perpignan
Salvador Dali • Painting, 1965, 295×406 cm
Description of the artwork «Train station in Perpignan»
"Train station in Perpignan" - a surreal painting by Salvador Dali with an equally surreal story. The artist often had to visit Perpignan, a French regional center with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants near the border with Spain. There was the nearest train station, from where Dali and Gala, residents of the fishing village of Port Lligat, sent paintings to the mainland by train.
Over time, the artist noticed an unusual pattern: whenever he was in this place, great thoughts began to overcome him: one is more brilliant than the other. And on September 19, 1963, he completely comprehended the structure of the universe there. "It turned out that the universe, being one of the most limited things of all that exists, in its structure, observing all-all proportions, is exactly like the Perpignan station, - wrote Dali in the book "Diary of a Genius". - Pin fact, the only difference is that in place of the ticket offices in the universe there would be the same mysterious sculpture, whose copy carved out of stone has been haunting me for several days.
Two years after the "cosmogonic ecstasy", as Dali called his then epiphany, he painted the picture "Train Station in Perpignan." This is a monumental canvas measuring almost 3 by 4 meters, on which, as usual, he managed to place all the best at once. The symmetrical composition is crowned by the figure of the artist himself with outstretched arms, plus another, almost the same, is located in the very center of the picture.
There was also a place for Gala - downstairs, on a sack of potatoes, with her back to the viewer. In the background is the figure of the crucified Christ in a crown of thorns, and on both sides of him Dali painted recognizable characters from the painting “Angelus»Jean-Francois Millet. They seem to mourn Christ, like Mary Magdalene and the Apostle John at the foot of the crucifixion.
This painting by the French artist Dali has a long history. For the first time he saw her reproduction at the age of nine, after which he literally lost his peace. "This picture caused in me an unreasonable fear, so piercing that the memory of two motionless silhouettes accompanied me for many years, causing the same feeling of depression and anxiety.", - he said. It got to the point that many years later, Dali turned to the administration of the Louvre, where the work was kept, with a request to analyze it.
The artist's intuition did not disappoint: under a layer of paint with potatoes, over which the peasants pray, a child's coffin was originally depicted, which radically changed the meaning of the whole picture and explained the tragic poses of the characters. This story impressed Dali so much that he reproduces it again and again in his works: researchers of his work have counted several dozen direct and indirect references to "Angelus" in the work of the Spanish surrealist (1, 2, 3).
In the painting "Train Station in Perpignan" Millet's characters are depicted several times, and it is not so easy to count the sacks of potatoes on it at once. In the scene where a peasant couple loads a sack onto a cart, it is completely transformed into a female silhouette clinging to a male one. A railway carriage hovers over these fun with potatoes, reminding that the picture is actually about a railway station. And not just any, but the center of the world, according to Salvador Dali.
The inhabitants of the French town were extremely flattered by such attention from the master. As a sign of respect (and to the delight of tourists), they placed a statue of Dali on the roof of the station in the same pose as in this picture. Later, it was moved to the center of Perpignan, from where the artist still gazes at the station that brought him so many wonderful discoveries.
The author: Natalia Azarenko
Over time, the artist noticed an unusual pattern: whenever he was in this place, great thoughts began to overcome him: one is more brilliant than the other. And on September 19, 1963, he completely comprehended the structure of the universe there. "It turned out that the universe, being one of the most limited things of all that exists, in its structure, observing all-all proportions, is exactly like the Perpignan station, - wrote Dali in the book "Diary of a Genius". - Pin fact, the only difference is that in place of the ticket offices in the universe there would be the same mysterious sculpture, whose copy carved out of stone has been haunting me for several days.
Two years after the "cosmogonic ecstasy", as Dali called his then epiphany, he painted the picture "Train Station in Perpignan." This is a monumental canvas measuring almost 3 by 4 meters, on which, as usual, he managed to place all the best at once. The symmetrical composition is crowned by the figure of the artist himself with outstretched arms, plus another, almost the same, is located in the very center of the picture.
There was also a place for Gala - downstairs, on a sack of potatoes, with her back to the viewer. In the background is the figure of the crucified Christ in a crown of thorns, and on both sides of him Dali painted recognizable characters from the painting “Angelus»Jean-Francois Millet. They seem to mourn Christ, like Mary Magdalene and the Apostle John at the foot of the crucifixion.
This painting by the French artist Dali has a long history. For the first time he saw her reproduction at the age of nine, after which he literally lost his peace. "This picture caused in me an unreasonable fear, so piercing that the memory of two motionless silhouettes accompanied me for many years, causing the same feeling of depression and anxiety.", - he said. It got to the point that many years later, Dali turned to the administration of the Louvre, where the work was kept, with a request to analyze it.
The artist's intuition did not disappoint: under a layer of paint with potatoes, over which the peasants pray, a child's coffin was originally depicted, which radically changed the meaning of the whole picture and explained the tragic poses of the characters. This story impressed Dali so much that he reproduces it again and again in his works: researchers of his work have counted several dozen direct and indirect references to "Angelus" in the work of the Spanish surrealist (1, 2, 3).
In the painting "Train Station in Perpignan" Millet's characters are depicted several times, and it is not so easy to count the sacks of potatoes on it at once. In the scene where a peasant couple loads a sack onto a cart, it is completely transformed into a female silhouette clinging to a male one. A railway carriage hovers over these fun with potatoes, reminding that the picture is actually about a railway station. And not just any, but the center of the world, according to Salvador Dali.
The inhabitants of the French town were extremely flattered by such attention from the master. As a sign of respect (and to the delight of tourists), they placed a statue of Dali on the roof of the station in the same pose as in this picture. Later, it was moved to the center of Perpignan, from where the artist still gazes at the station that brought him so many wonderful discoveries.
The author: Natalia Azarenko
