Ricard Balada – El caso Ángelus, la fascinación de Dalí

Ricard stars as a young Salvador Dalí in Joan Frank Charansonnet and Patchouli Films’ El caso Ángelus, la fascinación de Dalí, releasing in the new future.

With the full endorsement of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, the film will follow the life of the iconic Catalan surrealist through the lens of his love for Jean-François Millet’s painting L’Angélus currently housed at the Museé d’Orsay in Paris.

During the 60s while Dalí is reigning as one of the world’s most famous living artists, he is busy organising an appropriately extravagant surprise birthday party for one of his friends when a journalist arrives and asks to interview him about an essay he wrote more than 20 years earlier but was lost after he fled France following the Nazi invasion. 

Dalí first saw a print of Millet’s masterpiece while training at art school and became enamoured with it, creating multiple artworks based on it and publishing a book entitled Le Mythe tragique de l’Angélus de Millet in 1938.

The artwork shows a pair of French peasants at sunset standing in a field bowing their heads over a basket of potatoes and reciting the catholic Angelus prayer.

Going against common consensus, Dalí insisted that the scene did in fact not show evening prayer but a couple mourning over the body of their dead infant.

After writing an essay pleading his case, he was able to convince the Louvre to x-ray the painting, revealing a small painted-over geometric shape next to the basket between the praying pair.

While not conclusive it implies that Millet may have originally painted it as a burial scene similar to Gustave Courbet’s renowned masterpiece A Burial at Ornans but was changed into a prayer scene instead early on in its creation. 

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