Modest farmers … or an odyssey of sex and death? The millet masterpiece that electrified modern art | painting

It was Salvador Dalí, who converted a small, intensive rural scene called The Angelus, who was painted by Jean-François millet in 1857-59 and was very popular at his time.

In the original, a pious pair of farmers has the Angelus bell from a distant church, the Catholic callin belongs to prayer, and paused her work to dig potatoes to lower and pray the heads. But from Dalí's writings we know that he has seen far more in the painting, from obscene sex to family strag. In one of his many versions, Atavism in Twilight, the few agricultural devices feed from their bodies. In his surreal drawings, these good land countries are reduced, mummified sleeves or are transformed into fossils by time and sadness. Now that the original painting by the Musée d'Orsay in the National Gallery as the star of his upcoming show: Life on the Land will be borrowed, we will all get the chance to possess ourselves through this innocent work of art.

The Angelus was an immediate hit in the 19th century, while the original runs through a series of private collections at record prices until the Louvre, who bought it for France for the first time in 1889. In 1932 he may have received the ultimate fan homage: it was attacked several times with a bale knee. After the repair, it stayed in the Louvre until the Orsay opened in 1986.

Van Gogh, decades before Dalí, also copied it in a fervent drawing from 1880, which was one of his first artistic efforts – its inexperienced clumsyness makes emotion even more touching. He worshiped the Angelus as its ideal model for everything that should and should be art. In their fascination for Millet's masterpiece, both modernist giants show how a work of art can be in something else in the eye of the viewer. Dalí intentionally induced a state that resembled illness in his head to hallucinate the Angelus. “The only difference between me and a crazy thing is that I am not crazy,” he said. Van Gogh was of course less able to switch it on and off.

Van Gogh was in London and worked in the Covent Garden branch of the art dealer Goupil et Fils when he wrote about his power in one of his earliest letters. “The painting by Millet, L'Angelus du Soir,” he said in 1874 to his brother Theo, “it is indeed – that's great, that's poetry.” At the age of only 21, five years before he decided to become a painter, the son of the Dutch pastor in Angelus saw something uniquely poetic.

His creator, Jean-François Millet, was back then towards the end of his life. Like Bruegel centuries before him Millet painted rural life so authentically that people thought he was a farmer who shared his world. This was not completely unfounded: he was born in a farm family from Grouchy near the canal coast in Normandy. Millet said that the Angelus had presented a memory of this childhood: “The idea came because I remembered that my grandmother, who rang the church bell, always stopped falling in the fields, always stopped working.

Millet was not a naive artist. He trained in Paris with the history painter Paul Delaroche, who was famous for the execution of Lady Jane Gray (1833). But things didn't go well and he retired to Cherbourg. He seemed to hold on to a career as a local portrait painter.

Then he found himself suddenly. Millet began to paint the hard life of the peasantry. It was a political decision. He had his first goal with the Winnower, a painting of a man who shook a basket of grain and gold spots up into the air, so that the wheat is separated from the chaff when they fall. Does that sound allegorical? It is certainly that in 1848 this picture of a peasantry in the Paris Salon in the Paris Salon unveiled, the year in which revolutions circled in Europe. The following paintings are monuments for rural work: the chamber; The guests. Mare does not paint the landscape as an idyll, but as a place where the poor are worked to death.

Van Gogh Saw Millet's sympathy through a religious lens. Soon afterwards he was released to Theo's early letter and tried to become a preacher and missionary of the poor after a magic lesson. His family thought he had a religious mania. His passion included the adoration of millet. When he saw an exhibition with Hirt's drawings, he enthused: “I wanted to say myself, take your shoes out, because the place where they stand is sacred soil.”

Van Gogh's debt of millet is obvious in his early work. In his ditch farm woman from 1885, he gives the excavator massive, earthy presence – like Millet's people. But his most obvious reference to the Angelus are the potato eaters.

In Millet's Angelus, the farmers took a break from their tedious potatoes from the hard earth: we see spuds in their basket and in a plump sack in their wheelbarrow. Van Goghs The Potato Esers feels like the next chapter. The farmers went home to share a modest meal with their family. Van Gogh puts his claim here to refuse millet as a farmer's painter.

But does van Gogh react so intensively to Angelus as politics or religion for reasons that were more difficult to name? A surrealist would say yes. Dalí would see countless allegations in the Angelus – and to be Dalí.

For him, this painting was “the most disturbing, the most puzzling, the most densely, the richest in unconscious thoughts that have ever been.” The Angelus is less a piece of rustic life, more of a kitsch -surrealistic dream work.

Take a look at Millet's scene. The brown lumps of potato in the basket look stormy, while the informal sack can contain part of a body. The three tines of the huge fork were driven into the ground with unwanted violence. If this does not seem phallic enough, the two thick graves of the wheelbarrow browse from the woman's skirts. Do these Freudian intimances point to something unspeakable in the relationship of the characters? In Dalí's Atavism in Twilight, the fork in the woman's back is determined: the man dreams of satomizing her. According to Dalí, she is his mother.

Alternatively, he suggested that they were the parents of a dead child. Dalí believed that millet had originally painted a grave in the foreground. You can see it somehow. He persuaded the Louvre to X -ray and claimed that the results had confirmed his theory. It follows its eerie painting from 1965 the Perpignan train station, in which the grave becomes a railway line that the Angelus couple divides. Perpignan, the first stop in France from Spain, and where papers have been checked, a Liminal place between life and death becomes.

Dalí had enough ideas about the Angelus to fill a book and they did. He wrote the tragic myth of Millet's Angelus in the 1930s and published it three decades later. It was celebrated as the most ambitious theorization of what he described as a “paranoia -critical method”, in which they hallucinate layers and metamorphoses of an object or image. Did he mean a word of it? Was he really obsessed with the Angelus or did he just enjoy the idea that he was?

A piece of evidence was authentic the film from 1929, which he created with Luis Buñuel, and Chien Andalou, in which a couple like the farmers in the Angelus (but is reversed with male and female positions) are steered until their love is petrified and they are buried in sand. This film, Dalí's most spontaneous work of dream art, was shot before he went to the stock exchange with his millet. So the Angelus was really submitted in his psyche. Soon he painted it in his archaeological reminiscence of Millet Angelus from 1933, in which the couple became colossal and was slowly eroded over a desert.

Dalí's lifelong attempt to understand why the Angelus prompted him became a surreal odyssey of sex and death, which is a good guide to enjoying a work of work. We should all be a bit paranoia -critical when we visit an art gallery and let a work of art suggest as many things as it comes to mind.

I can refer to it because I am strangely enthusiastic that the painting of two French farmers comes to the National Gallery in a flat, bleak landscape with a church flows on the gold line. The first time I saw that it wasn't near a museum anywhere, but in a hypermarket in rural France on a camping trip as a teenager. There it was as a cheap pressure on canvas this bright, frozen scene. I had to buy it.

Why does art catch us? Sometimes a certain painting seems to say more than you can express and stay in you. This is the secret of art and the secret of Angelus. I don't say what I see in it – I am not sure if I want to know, let alone want to admit. But it calls me like a bell at Twilight.