Palais Idéal in Hautrives - Trains, dreams and naïve art

by Jacob Hallerström (Sweden)

I didn't expect to find France

Palais Idéal in Hautrives By Jacob Hallerström I’m going to Lyon from Béziers by train, on a mystic morning train. It’s raining outside my train window and all of Provence turns into swamplands. Over the world lies a grey veil, like a quilt. In France the railwaymen are on strike. At the entrance of the train station I am handed a pamphlet; “pour le transport collectif!” says the curly headed lady from the SNCF and smiles at me. I am soaking wet and my fellow train passengers are just as wet as me. My destination for this days’ journey is the tiny village Hautrives. Ferdinad Cheval was a French mailman who lived at the end of the 19th century. He lived and spent all his life in the region I’m travelling right now, north of the riviera and south of the alps. His daily work was delivering mail in and around his domestic village Hautrives. What makes Cheval worth this article I’m now writing is what he built. According to his own notebooks the initial step toward what would develop into his life’s work was taken on a day in April 1879 when he was walking along a gravel road in Hautrvies. From the gravel Cheval picked up a small rock that wore a peculiar, almost surreal shape. The mailman was astonished by what he had picked up. Cheval later wrote about the incident in his biography saying that the rock evoked a feeling of inspiration, a feeling so strong that he decided to build a palace with the rock as inspiration. This became the start of what would become Ferdinand Cheval’s Palais Idéal. He started in his small vegetable garden. He devoted his time while not working to grinding, sharpening and polishing stones and planning the building he had in his head. The vegetable garden was soon transformed, the construction site was enlarged and after 33 years of constant continuous construction by hand a completely unique building stood tall in the small French village of Hautrives. It was all made up, planned and built by Cheval himself and his hands. Palais Idéal has a style, form and shape like nothing else. It can best be described as something of a metamorphosis of sandcastles and Hindu temples. Nobody has completely figured out where the architectural inspiration for the Palais Idéal came from. A likely theory is that the mailman saw and was inspired by postcards in circulation during this period. In the late 1800s motifs from countries like India, Burma, China, countries far from Hautrives and France became popular themes on postcards. Today the Palais Idéal is seen as a tour de force and supreme example of naïve art. Among the first people to shed light on Cheval’s creation were the surrealists of the 1920s. They loved and were exalted by this surreal building in it’s proper use of the term. André Breton was there, Pablo Picasso as well. They painted, photographed and studied the palace. They were blown away by the Palais, perhaps because the creation Cheval made stood and stands for something the surrealists held very high, dreams. Both the building itself and the story of how it was made are like things taken from surreal dreams. Cheval’s wish was to be buried in his palais. This was not approved by the local authorities so at the very end of his life Cheval went to work on a mausoleum for himself and his wife in the town cemetery. Built in the same style as the Palais Idéal this is where Cheval today rests. For me the Palais Idéal shows a most fundamental form of expression. Cheval built in his own world and his soul in the palais and standing eye to eye with the building is like standing eye to eye with a dream, a dream made of stone. I’m on a train again. This time toward Marseille. Here in the valleys they make wine and the grapevines stand in lines with all their splendour. Beyond the horizon are the alps and they blow up like enormous air balloons above the valleys. The altitude is intoxicating.