Photos

The Center of the Universe
It’s the Spanish painter Salvador Dali who declared the railway station in Perignan to be The center of Universe at Sep. 19th. 1963. You will read more of the background below – but excuse me as the railroad station is simply boring:
You better look here for the station itself – For me (and probably for you if you ever visited Perpignan) – it is a wonder how a city detail photographed as here, right in the centre of the town, can come out like this: Idyllic, attractive and with the large holy mountain for the Catalans, Mont Canigou in the back – The fact is that right behind me is a huge street-cross with lots of lanes, cars, buses, and mingling life and disturbance – to not say polluting. But then maybe he was right Salvador Dali declaring Perpignan the Center of the Universe ;-)

There is an esoteric dimension to this man. Dali considered the station of the French town of Perpignan to be the centre of the universe. Uncomfortable with the administrative details at the Spanish station of Figueres, he opted to ship all his large canvases to his customers from the station in Perpignan. But there was more to it than that. Dali stated that he had a vision while inside the station of Perpignan, on September 19, 1963. “I had an example of a cosmogonic ecstasy, more powerful than the preceding ones. I had a precise vision of the constitution of the Universe.” And for Dali, that was the real reason why he saw the station as the centre of the universe – however bizarre that may be to anyone who has ever visited this unimpressive building.
The vision from 1963 was followed by a painting of the Station of Perpignan, one of his masterpieces, which went on display on December 18, 1965, in New York. In the invitation sent out for the opening night of the exhibition, Dali repeated his claim that the station would be the location from where the universe would start to converge.
Ref. http://www.philipcoppens.com/dali.html

Salvador Dalí
(1904-1989), Painter, Spain
"Spanish painter. Born into a middle-class family, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, where he mastered academic techniques. Dalí also pursued his personal interest in Cubism and Futurism and was expelled from the academy for indiscipline in 1923. He formed friendships with Lorca and Buñuel, read Freud with enthusiasm and held his first one-man show in Barcelona (1925), where he exhibited a number of seascapes. He wrote the screenplay for Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (produced in 1928), largely thanks to which he was adopted by the Surrealists. In Paris he met Picasso and Breton, and his involvement from 1929 onwards, his effervescent activity, his flair for getting publicity through scandal and his vivacity which counterbalanced the political difficulties encountered by the group, made him a particularly welcome addition.

…me (?) I’m in the “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” – simply lunch time ;-)