![]() Many commentators have interpreted Dalí’s ants, a recurrent theme in his paintings, which can seen on the face of one of the painting’s pocket watches, as a symbol for decay. Though Dalí denied this, citing, instead a Camembert cheese he had seen melt in the sun as the inspiration for this central motif. Some have suggested that the watches refer to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Yet, just as with the local mountains in the background, there are a few recongisable features in this work. The dripping watches and deformed face in this painting certainly look like an unalloyed expression of the subconscious. ![]() He even claimed to paint in a kind of self-induced hallucinatory state, which he called his ‘paranoiac-critical method’, enabling him to “systematize confusion and thus discredit completely the world of reality,” much to the delight of the French Surrealist co-founder Andre Breton. It also demonstrated his peerless grasp of Surrealism.ĭalí (left) and Man Ray in Paris, June, 1934ĭalí had officially joined the Surrealists in 1929, and remained intensely interested in the idea of subconscious art. The work not only displayed the 27-year-old painter’s technical proficiency and admiration for old masters – Dalí sported a pointed moustache in later life partly in tribute to Diego Velázquez. Yet it was these neighbouring mountains, in particular the craggy Cap de Creus peninsular and the nearby Mount Pani, that can be seen in his best-known work, painted while in this fishing village, which would make this poor artist a star: The Persistence of Memory.ĭalí created the famous work in 1931, completing it in August of that year. Penniless and outcast from the community which had inspired much of his art, the painter and his wife settled in a small fishing settlement, Port Lligat, buying a single-room fishing shack, where, “they had to suffer the damp walls and could mountain wind, the ‘tramontana’ which assails the region during the winter.” ![]() What’s more, this excommunication extended beyond his father’s house, as Robert Radford explains in our monograph, “a man of local influence let it be known that the ban extended to the whole village, and when Dalí insisted on returning he was snubbed and ignored in the streets.” This was hardship enough for the scandalous young painter, who, although part of the new Surrealist movement, had yet to find decent patronage among art dealers. On 28 December 1929, Salvador Dalí’s father threw the 25-year-old painter out of the family home. One can observe that the creature has one closed eye with several eyelashes, suggesting that the creature is also in a dream state.The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dalí Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory explainedįind out how the Spanish Surrealist went from penniless painter to toast of the NYC artworld in one single canvas The creature seems to be based on a figure from the Paradise section of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. It is possible to recognize a human figure in the middle of the composition, in the strange “monster” that Dalí used in several contemporary pieces to represent himself, the abstract form becoming something of a self-portrait, reappearing frequently in his work. This interpretation suggests that Dalí was incorporating an understanding of the world, introduced by Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity. The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order." It epitomizes Dalí’s theory of “softness” and “hardness”, which was central to his thinking at the time. The well-known surrealist piece introduced the image of the soft melting pocket watch. It is widely recognized and frequently referenced in popular culture, and sometimes referred to by more descriptive titles, such as “Melting Clocks”, “The Soft Watches” or “The Melting Watches”. First shown at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932, since 1934 the painting has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which received it from an anonymous donor. “The Persistence of Memory” is a 1931 painting by artist Salvador Dalí, and one of the most recognizable works of surrealism.
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