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The Persistence of Memory

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This article is about the painting by Salvador Dalí. For the novel by Tony Eprile, see The Persistence of Memory (novel).
The Persistence of Memory
ArtistSalvador Dalí
Year1931 (1931)
TypeOil on canvas
Dimensions24 cm × 33 cm (9.5 in × 13 in)
LocationMuseum of Modern Art, New York City

The Persistence of Memory (Template:Lang-es; Template:Lang-ca) is a 1931 painting by artist Salvador Dalí, and is one of his most recognizable works. The painting has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City since 1934. It is widely recognized and frequently referenced in popular culture.[1]

Description

The well-known surrealist piece introduced the image of the soft melting pocket watch.[2] It epitomizes Dalí's theory of "softness" and "hardness", which was central to his thinking at the time. As Dawn Ades wrote, "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".[3] This interpretation suggests that Dalí was incorporating an understanding of the world introduced by Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. Asked by Ilya Prigogine whether this was in fact the case, Dalí replied that the soft watches were not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by the surrealist perception of a Camembert cheese melting in the sun.[4]

Although fundamentally part of Dalí's Freudian phase, the imagery precedes his transition to his scientific phase by fourteen years, which occurred after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

It is possible to recognize a human figure in the middle of the composition, in the strange "monster" that Dalí used in several period pieces to represent himself – the abstract form becoming something of a self-portrait, reappearing frequently in his work. The orange clock at the bottom left of the painting is covered in ants. Dalí often used ants in his paintings as a symbol for death, as well as a symbol of female genitalia.

The figure in the middle of the picture can be read as a "fading" creature, one that often appears in dreams where the dreamer cannot pinpoint the creature's exact form and composition. One can observe that the creature has one closed eye with several eyelashes, suggesting that the creature is also in a dream state. The iconography may refer to a dream that Dalí himself had experienced, and the clocks may symbolize the passing of time as one experiences it in sleep.

The Persistence of Memory employs "the exactitude of realist painting techniques"[5] to depict imagery more likely to be found in dreams than in waking consciousness.

Versions

Dalí returned to the theme of this painting with the variation The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1954), showing his earlier famous work systematically fragmenting into smaller component elements, and a series of rectangular blocks which reveal further imagery through the gaps between them, implying something beneath the surface of the original work; this work is now in the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, while the original Persistence of Memory remains at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Dalí also produced various lithographs and sculptures on the theme of soft watches late in his career. Some of these sculptures are the Persistence of Memory, the Nobility of Time, the Profile of Time and the Three Dancing Watches.[6]

See also

References

Notes
  1. ^ Staff editor (28 January 1989). "Dali, The Flamboyant Surrealist". The Vindicator. Retrieved 20 June 2011. The death of Salvador Dali evokes the image of his most famous painting, 'Persistence of Memory.' {{cite news}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  2. ^ Bradbury, Kirsten (1999). Essential Dalí. Dempsey Parr. ISBN 978-1-84084-509-9. It includes the first appearance of what is perhaps his most enduring image: the 'soft watch'.
  3. ^ Ades, Dawn. Dalí. Thames and Hudson, 1982.
  4. ^ Salvador Dali (2008). The Dali Dimension: Decoding the Mind of a Genius (DVD). Media 3.14-TVC-FGSD-IRL-AVRO. Surprisingly, Dalí said that his soft watches were not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by the surrealist perception of a Camembert cheese melting in the sun. The painter insisted on this explanation in his reply letter to Prigogine, who took it as Dalí's reaction to Einstein's coldly mathematical theory.
  5. ^ "Dali's dream environments were represented through the exactitude of realist painting techniques, like those found in his Persistence of Memory (1931)." Surrealism and architecture, by Thomas Mical; Psychology Press, 2005
  6. ^ Dalis Sculpture Editions



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