Surrealist painter, Spaniard Salvador Dali became one of the most enigmatic painters of the twentieth century. Known for its outlandish and controversial subject matter, his painting "The Persistence of Memory" (1931), is recognized as the greatest masterpiece of surrealism. But what essence did the genius veil on this canvas? There are many interpretations of the picture and they are completely different.

The meaning behind the brush strokes is not easy to grasp. The painting shows four clocks and a desert landscape in the background. Keepers of the Time, against all odds, emerge from their familiar form, which looks a bit ominous. And, apparently, they intend to melt "until the end." "Cute" story makes you think. Why is the clock spreading? Why are they in the desert and where are people lost? The meaning of this picture seems inadequate and illogical, but the almost photographic execution hints at the opposite.

Perhaps Dali depicted the state of sleep so often discussed by the surrealists. After all, only in a dream, unrelated people, places and objects are able to come together into a single whole, because only in a dream, seconds with minutes depreciate. If so, then the deformed clock symbolizes the uncertainty of the passage of time at night. During the day, we are able to track and control time, but when we sleep, it plays by different rules. If you look at it from that angle, it looks plausible. In a dream, the clock is powerless, we do not feel time, which means that the clock can only melt from its own uselessness.

Some art historians believe that the deformed clock may symbolize Einstein's theory of relativity, which was new and revolutionary in the 1930s. With her help, Einstein proposed a new idea of ​​time as a category more complex, not subject to calculus on the dial. Through such a prism, it begins to seem that the distorted clock symbolizes the incompetence of its pocket and wall counterparts in the post-Einstein world.

Jokes, humor, sarcasm and word play were an integral part of the work of the surrealists. It is possible that this same sarcasm touched the Persistence of Memory as well. After all, a spreading watch can mean anything, but not constancy. The ants eating the dial of a red clock may represent the human habit of wasting time thoughtlessly and haphazardly.

A devastated, barren landscape... Many art connoisseurs believe that Dali painted the coastline of the beach in his hometown. The supposed, autobiographical meaning, refers us to memories from the childhood memory of El Salvador. An uninhabited, abandoned coast, dead since Dali left it. With a distorted clock, Dali probably hinted that his childhood was a thing of bygone days.

"The Persistence of Memory"- a real icon of surrealism of the twentieth century. Its true meaning remains a mystery to us to this day, and this is unlikely to change. It is believed that here Dali collected a whole amalgam of ideas and shades of a historical, autobiographical, artistic and political nature.

Dali suffered from paranoia, but without him Dali would not exist as an artist. Dali had bouts of mild delirium, which he could transfer to the canvas. The thoughts that visited Dali during the creation of paintings have always been bizarre. The history of the emergence of one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory, is a vivid example of this.

(1) Soft watch- a symbol of non-linear, subjective time, arbitrarily flowing and unevenly filling space. The three clocks in the picture are past, present and future. “You asked me,” Dali wrote to physicist Ilya Prigogine, “whether I was thinking about Einstein when I was drawing soft clocks (meaning the theory of relativity). I answer you in the negative, the fact is that the connection between space and time was absolutely obvious to me for a long time, so there was nothing special in this picture for me, it was the same as any other ... To this I can add that I thought of Heraclitus (an ancient Greek philosopher who believed that time is measured by the flow of thought). That is why my painting is called The Persistence of Memory. Memory of the relationship of space and time.

(2) Blurred object with eyelashes. This is a self-portrait of a sleeping Dali. The world in the picture is his dream, the death of the objective world, the triumph of the unconscious. “The relationship between sleep, love and death is obvious,” the artist wrote in his autobiography. “Sleep is death, or at least it is an exclusion from reality, or, even better, it is the death of reality itself, which dies in the same way during the act of love.” According to Dali, sleep frees the subconscious, so the artist's head blurs like a clam - this is evidence of his defenselessness. Only Gala, he will say after the death of his wife, “knowing my defenselessness, hid my hermit oyster pulp in a fortress-shell, and thus saved it.”

(3) Solid watchlie on the left with the dial down - this is a symbol of objective time.

(4) Ants- a symbol of decay and decay. According to Nina Getashvili, a professor at the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, “the childhood impression of a wounded bat infested with ants, as well as the artist’s own recollection of a bathing baby with ants in the anus, endowed the artist with the obsessive presence of this insect in his paintings for life.

On the clock on the left, the only one that has retained its hardness, the ants also create a clear cyclic structure, obeying the divisions of the chronometer. However, this does not obscure the meaning that the presence of ants is still a sign of decay.” According to Dali, linear time devours itself.

(5) Fly.According to Nina Getashvili, “the artist called them fairies of the Mediterranean. In The Diary of a Genius, Dali wrote: "They carried inspiration to the Greek philosophers who spent their lives under the sun, covered in flies."

(6) Oliva.For the artist, this is a symbol of ancient wisdom, which, unfortunately, has already sunk into oblivion and therefore the tree is depicted dry.

(7) Cape Creus.This cape on the Catalan coast of the Mediterranean Sea, near the city of Figueres, where Dali was born. The artist often depicted him in paintings. “Here,” he wrote, “the most important principle of my theory of paranoid metamorphoses (the flow of one delusional image into another) is embodied in rock granite. These are frozen clouds reared up by an explosion in all their countless incarnations, all new and new - you just need to slightly change the angle of view.

(8) Seafor Dali it symbolized immortality and eternity. The artist considered it an ideal space for traveling, where time does not flow at an objective speed, but in accordance with the internal rhythms of the traveler's consciousness.

(9) Egg.According to Nina Getashvili, the World Egg in Dali's work symbolizes life. The artist borrowed his image from the Orphics - ancient Greek mystics. According to Orphic mythology, the first androgynous deity Phanes was born from the World Egg, who created people, and heaven and earth were formed from the two halves of its shell.

(10) Mirrorlying horizontally to the left. It is a symbol of variability and inconstancy, obediently reflecting both the subjective and objective world.

Salvador Dali. "The Persistence of Memory"

To the 105th anniversary of the birth

The beginning of the 20th century is a time of searching for new ideas. People wanted something different. In literature, experiments with the word begin, in painting - with the image. Symbolists, Fauvists, Futurists, Cubists, Surrealists appear.

Surrealism (from the French surrealisme - super-realism) is a trend in art, philosophy and culture that was formed in the 1920s in France. The main concept of surrealism - surreality - the combination of dream and reality. Surrealism - the rules of inconsistencies, the connection of the incompatible, that is, the convergence of images that are completely alien to each other, in a situation completely alien to them. The French writer is considered the founder and ideologist of surrealism.

The greatest representative of surrealism in the visual arts is the Spanish artist Salvador Dali (1904-1979). From childhood he was fond of drawing. The study of the work of contemporary artists, acquaintance with the works of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) had a decisive influence on the development of the pictorial method and aesthetic views of the future master. "Surrealism is me!" - said Salvador Dali. He treated his own paintings as hand-made photographs of his dreams. And they really represent stunning combinations of the unreality of a dream and a photographic image. In addition to painting, Dali was engaged in theater, literature, art theory, ballet and cinema.

An important role in the life of the surrealist was played by his acquaintance in 1929 with (nee Russian Elena Deluvina-Dyakonova). This unusual woman became a muse and dramatically changed the life of the artist. became a legendary couple, like Dante and Beatrice.

The works of Salvador Dali are distinguished by exceptional expressive power and are known throughout the world. He painted about two thousand paintings that never cease to amaze: a different reality, unusual images. One of the famous works of the painter The Persistence of Memory, which is also called Melted clock, in relation to the subject of the image.

The history of the creation of this composition is interesting. Once, while waiting for Gala to return home, Dali painted a picture with a deserted beach and rocks, without any thematic focus. According to the artist himself, the image of softening time was born in him at the sight of a piece of Camembert cheese, which became soft from the heat and began to melt on a plate. The natural order of things began to collapse and the image of a spreading watch appeared. Grabbing a brush, Salvador Dali began to fill the desert landscape with melting hours. Two hours later the canvas was finished. The author named his work The Persistence of Memory.

The Persistence of Memory. 1931.
Canvas, oil. 24x33.
Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The work was created at the moment of insight, when the surrealist felt that painting can prove that everything in the universe is connected and imbued with a single spiritual principle. So, under the brush of Dali, stopping time was born. Next to the soft melting clock, the author depicted a hard pocket watch covered with ants, as a sign that time can move in different ways, either flow smoothly or be corroded by corruption, which, according to Dali, meant decay, symbolized here by the bustle of insatiable ants. The sleeping head is a portrait of the artist himself.

The picture gives the viewer a variety of associations, sensations, which, at times, are difficult to express in words. Someone finds here images of conscious and unconscious memory, someone finds “fluctuations between ups and downs in the state of wakefulness and sleep.” Be that as it may, the author of the composition achieved the main thing - he managed to create an unforgettable work that has become a classic of surrealism. Gala, returning home, quite correctly predicted that, having seen once, no one will forget The Persistence of Memory. The canvas has become a symbol of the modern concept of the relativity of time.

After the exhibition of the painting in the Parisian salon of Pierre Colet, it was acquired by the New York Museum. In 1932, from January 9 to 29, she was presented at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York "Surrealist Painting, Drawing and Photography". Paintings and drawings by Salvador Dali, marked by unbridled imagination and virtuoso technique, are very popular all over the world.

Salvador Dali became famous all over the world thanks to his inimitable surreal style of painting. The most famous works of the author include his personal self-portrait, where he depicted himself with a neck in the style of Raphael's brush, "Flesh on the Stones", "Enlightened Pleasures", "The Invisible Man". However, Salvador Dali wrote The Persistence of Memory, adding this work to one of his most profound theories. This happened at the junction of his stylistic rethinking, when the artist joined the current of surrealism.

"The Persistence of Memory". Salvador Dali and his Freudian theory

The famous canvas was created in 1931, when the artist is in a state of heightened excitement from the theories of his idol, the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. In general terms, the idea of ​​the painting was to convey the artist's attitude to softness and hardness.

Being a very egocentric person, prone to outbursts of uncontrollable inspiration and at the same time carefully comprehending it from the point of view of psychoanalysis, Salvador Dali, like all creative personalities, created his masterpiece under the influence of a hot summer day. As the artist himself recalls, he was puzzled by the contemplation of how the heat melts him and used to be attracted by the theme of transforming objects into different states, which he tried to convey on canvas. The painting "The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali is a symbiosis of melted cheese with an olive tree standing alone against the backdrop of mountains. By the way, it was this image that became the prototype of soft watches.

Description of the picture

Almost all the works of that period are filled with abstract images of human faces hidden behind the forms of foreign objects. They seem to be hidden from view, but at the same time they are the main acting characters. So the surrealist tried to depict the subconscious in his works. The central figure of the painting "The Persistence of Memory" Salvador Dali made a face that is similar to his self-portrait.

The picture seems to have absorbed all the significant stages in the life of the artist, and also displayed the inevitable future. You can see that in the lower left corner of the canvas you can see a closed clock completely dotted with ants. Dali often resorted to the image of these insects, which for him were associated with death. The shape and color of the clock was based on the artist's memories of one in his childhood home that was broken. By the way, the mountains that can be seen are nothing more than a piece from the landscape of the Spaniard's homeland.

"The Persistence of Memory" Salvador Dali portrayed somewhat devastated. It is clearly seen that all objects are separated by a desert and are not self-sufficient. Art critics believe that by doing this the author tried to convey his spiritual emptiness, which weighed on him at that time. In fact, the idea was to convey human anguish about the passage of time and changes in memory. Time, according to Dali, is infinite, relative and in constant motion. Memory, on the other hand, is short-lived, but its stability should not be underestimated.

Secret images in the picture

“The Persistence of Memory” Salvador Dali wrote in a couple of hours and did not bother to give anyone an explanation about what he wanted to say with this canvas. Many art historians are still building hypotheses around this iconic work of the master, noticing in it only individual symbols that the artist resorted to throughout his life.

Upon closer examination, you can see that the clock hanging from the branch on the left is shaped like a tongue. The tree on the canvas is depicted withered, indicating the destructive aspect of time. This work is small in size, but is considered the most powerful of all that Salvador Dali wrote. "The Persistence of Memory" is certainly the most psychologically deep picture that reveals the author's inner world to the maximum. Perhaps that is why he did not want to comment on it, leaving his admirers to guess.

“The fact that I myself do not know anything about their meaning at the moment of drawing my pictures does not at all mean that these images are devoid of any meaning.” Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali "The Persistence of Memory" ("Soft Watch", "The Hardness of Memory", "The Persistence of Memory", "The Persistence of Memory")

Year of creation 1931 Oil on canvas, 24*33 cm The painting is in the Museum of Modern Art in the city of New York.

The work of the great Spaniard Salvador Dali, like his life, always arouses genuine interest. His paintings, largely incomprehensible, attract attention with originality and extravagance. Someone forever remains enchanted in search of "special meaning", and someone with undisguised disgust speaks of the artist's mental illness. But neither one nor the other can deny genius.

Now we are at the Museum of Modern Art in the city of New York in front of the great Dali's painting "The Persistence of Memory". Let's take a look at it.

The plot of the picture takes place against the backdrop of a desert surreal landscape. In the distance we see the sea, in the upper right corner of the picture bordering on the golden mountains. The main attention of the viewer is riveted to a bluish pocket watch, which slowly melts in the sun. Some of them flow down over a strange creature that lies on the lifeless earth in the center of the composition. In this creature, one can recognize a shapeless human figure, shivering with closed eyes and protruding tongue. In the left corner of the picture in the foreground is a table. Two more clocks lie on this table - one of them flows down from the edge of the table, the other, rusty orange, retaining its original shape, is covered with ants. On the far edge of the table rises a dry broken tree, from the branch of which the last bluish clock flows.

Yes, Dali's paintings are an attack on a normal psyche. What is the history of the painting? The work was created in 1931. The legend says that, while waiting for Gala, the artist's wife, to return home, Dali painted a picture with a deserted beach and rocks, and the image of softening time was born to him at the sight of a piece of Camembert cheese. The color of the bluish clock was allegedly chosen by the artist, as follows. On the facade of the house in Port Ligat, where Dali lived, there is a broken sundial. They are still pale blue, although the paint is gradually fading - exactly the same color as in the painting "The Persistence of Memory".

The painting was first exhibited in Paris, at the Pierre Collet Gallery, in 1931, where it was purchased for $250. In 1933, the painting was sold to Stanley Resor, who in 1934 donated the work to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Let's try to figure out, as far as possible, whether there is some hidden meaning in this work. It is not known what looks like more confusion - the very plots of the paintings of the great Dali or attempts to interpret them. I propose to look at how different people interpreted the picture.

The outstanding art historian Federico Dzeri (F. Zeri) wrote in his research that Salvador Dali “in the language of allusions and symbols designated conscious and active memory in the form of a mechanical clock and ants scurrying about in them, and the unconscious in the form of a soft clock that shows an indefinite time. The Persistence of Memory thus depicts the fluctuations between ups and downs in the waking and sleeping states.

Edmund Swinglehurst (E. Swinglehurst) in the book “Salvador Dali. Exploring the irrational” also tries to analyze “The Persistence of Memory”: “Next to the soft clock, Dali depicted a hard pocket watch covered with ants, as a sign that time can move in different ways: either flow smoothly or be corroded by corruption, which, according to Dali , meant decay, symbolized here by the bustle of insatiable ants. According to Swingleharst, "The Persistence of Memory" has become a symbol of the modern concept of the relativity of time. Another researcher of the genius, Gilles Neret, in his book Dali, spoke very succinctly about the Persistence of Memory: “The famous “soft watch” is inspired by the image of Camembert cheese melting in the sun.”

However, it is known that almost every work of Salvador Dali has a pronounced sexual connotation. The famous 20th-century writer George Orwell wrote that Salvador Dali "is equipped with such a complete and excellent set of perversions that anyone can envy him." In this regard, interesting conclusions are drawn by our contemporary, an adherent of classical psychoanalysis, Igor Poperechny. Was it really only the "metaphor of the flexibility of time" that was put on public display? It is full of uncertainty and lack of intrigue, which is extremely unusual for Dali.

In his work “The Mind Games of Salvador Dali”, Igor Poperechny came to the conclusion that the “set of perversions” that Orwell spoke about is present in all the works of the great Spaniard. In the course of the analysis of the entire work of the Genius, certain groups of symbols were identified, which, with an appropriate arrangement in the picture, determine its semantic content. There are several such symbols in The Persistence of Memory. These are spreading watches and a face “flattened” with pleasure, ants and flies depicted on dials that show strictly 6 hours.

Analyzing each of the groups of symbols, their location in the paintings, taking into account the traditions of the meanings of the symbols, the researcher came to the conclusion that the secret of Salvador Dali lies in the denial of the death of the mother and the incestuous desire for her.

Being in an illusion artificially created by himself, Salvador Dali lived for 68 years after the death of his mother in anticipation of a miracle - her appearance in this world. One of the main ideas of numerous paintings of the genius was the idea of ​​the mother being in a lethargic dream. A hint of lethargic sleep was the omnipresent ants, which in ancient Moroccan medicine fed people in this state. According to Igor Poperechny, in many canvases Dali depicts the mother with symbols: in the form of pets, birds, as well as mountains, rocks or stones. In the picture that we are currently studying, at first you may not notice a small rock on which a shapeless creature is spreading, which is a kind of Dali's self-portrait...

The soft clock in the picture shows the same time - 6 hours. Judging by the bright colors of the landscape, this is morning, because in Catalonia, Dali's homeland, night does not come at 6 o'clock. What worries a man at six in the morning? After what morning sensations did Dali wake up “completely broken”, as Dali himself mentioned in his book “The Diary of a Genius”? Why does a fly sit on a soft watch, in Dali's symbolism - a sign of vice and spiritual decay?

Based on all this, the researcher comes to the conclusion that the picture captures the time when Dali’s face experiences vicious pleasure, indulging in “moral decay”.

These are some points of view on the hidden meaning of the Dali painting. It remains for you to decide which of the interpretations you like best.

Salvador Dali's painting "The Persistence of Memory" is perhaps the most famous of the artist's works. The softness of a hanging and flowing clock is one of the most unusual images ever used in painting. What did Dali mean by this? And did you really want to? We can only guess. One has only to recognize Dali's victory, won with the words: "Surrealism is me!"

This is where the tour comes to an end. Please ask questions.