In The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali painted seemingly melting watches in a desolate landscape. Objects that defy everyday logic form a distinctly Surrealist scene.
The painting is not a diagram of physics. Its visual distortions explore dreams and perception, and later viewers have interpreted its imagery in different ways.
Historical context
The Persistence of Memory (Catalan: La persistència de la memòria, Spanish: La persistencia de la memoria) is a 1931 painting by artist Salvador Dalí and one of the most recognizable works of Surrealism. First exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932 and sold for $250, The Persistence of Memory was donated to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City two years later in 1934 by an anonymous donor, where it has remained ever since. It is widely recognized and frequently referred to in popular culture, and sometimes referred to by more descriptive titles, such as "The Melting Clocks", "The Soft Watches" or "The Melting Watches".
Analysis
The well-known surrealist piece introduced the image of the soft melting pocket watch. It epitomizes Dalí's theory of "softness" and "hardness", which was central to his thinking at the time. As Dawn Adès 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". This interpretation suggests that Dalí was incorporating an understanding of the world introduced by Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity. Asked by Ilya Prigogine whether this was the case, Dalí replied that the soft watches were not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by the surrealist perception of a Camembert melting in the sun.
The year prior to painting the Persistence of Memory, Dalí developed his "paranoiac-critical method", deliberately inducing psychotic hallucinations to inspire his art. He remarked, "The difference between a madman and me is that I am not mad."
In the center of the painting, beneath the rightmost clock, is a distorted human face in profile. The monstrous, fleshy creature (with much texture near its face, and much contrast and tone in the picture) draped across the painting's center is at once alien and familiar. It is an approximation of Dalí's own face, elevating the piece from pure abstraction into something of a self-portrait. Similar creatures appear frequently in Dalí's work, including a being who appears in his earlier painting The Great Masturbator. The creature seems to have been originally modeled after a figure from the "Paradise" section of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, which Dalí had studied. It 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.
The creature has one closed eye with several eyelashes, suggesting that it is also in a dream or resting 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 in sleep, or the persistence of time in the eyes of the dreamer.
The craggy rocks to the right represent the tip of Cap de Creus peninsula in north-eastern Catalonia. Many of Dalí's paintings were inspired by the landscapes of his life in Catalonia. The strange and foreboding shadow in the foreground of this painting is a reference to Puig Pení, a mountain in the northeast corner of Catalonia. The elongated and distorted tree on the left is an iconic character in Dalí's works.