Test yourself with intriguing facts about France's cultural heritage, including Salvador Dalí's inspiration, André Malraux's adventures and Henri Matisse's art
Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí always found inspiration from Perpignan train station. In Diary of a Genius, he wrote: “On the 19th of September, at the station at Perpignan, I had a kind of cosmogonic ecstasy stronger than the preceding ones. I have had an exact view of the constitution of the universe. The universe, which is one of the most limited things that exists, would be, in all proportions, similar in structure to the station at Perpignan.”
Q: Who accused Dalí of “scuttling off like a rat as soon as France is in danger” when WW2 broke out, following the artist’s prosperous pre-war years in the country?
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A) George Orwell
2. Light fingers
One of France’s great writers, and its Minister of Culture from 1959 to 1969, André Malraux was not quite so respectful of cultural heritage in 1923. The 22-year-old was on a four-week tour of Cambodia when he and his wife Clara Goldschmidt, stole four Hindu deity statues from the Banteay Srei Khmer temple. They were soon arrested and the statues returned.
Q: Malraux’s most celebrated novel La Condition Humaine (translated as Man’s Fate) is set in which city?
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A) Shanghai
Matisse's Le Bateau cut-outWikimedia Fair use
3. A sinking ship
On October 1961 New York’s Museum of Modern Art hung a Henri Matisse paper cut-out called Le Bateau. The only problem? It was upside downand nobody, including museum staff and the 116,000 visitors who saw it, noticed for 47 days.
It was a Wall Street stockbroker, Genevieve Habert, who alerted curators to the error after three visits to the show.
Q: In which Nord town was Matisse born in December 1869?
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A) Henri Matisse was born on December 31 1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Nord, in the Hauts-de-France region. He died in Nice on November 3 1954.
