In early August 1929, young Dali met his future wife and muse Gala. Their union became the key to the incredible success of the artist, influencing all his subsequent work, including the painting "The Persistence of Memory".
Salvador Dali and Gala in Cadaqués. 1930 Photo: courtesy of the Pushkin Museum im. A.S. Pushkin
History of creation
They say that Dali was a little out of his mind. Yes, he suffered from paranoia. But without this, there would be no Dali as an artist. He had mild delirium, expressed in the appearance in the mind of dream images that the artist could transfer to the canvas. The thoughts that visited Dali during the creation of paintings were always bizarre (it was not for nothing that he was fond of psychoanalysis), and a vivid example of this is the story of the appearance of one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory (New York, Museum of Modern Art).
It was the summer of 1931 in Paris, when Dali was preparing for a solo exhibition. After seeing his common-law wife Gala with friends at the cinema, “I,” Dali writes in his memoirs, “returned to the table (we finished dinner with an excellent Camembert) and plunged into thoughts about the spreading pulp. Cheese popped into my mind's eye. I got up and, as usual, went to the studio - to look at the picture I was painting before going to bed. It was the landscape of Port Lligat in the transparent, sad sunset light. In the foreground is the bare skeleton of an olive tree with a broken branch.I felt that in this picture I managed to create an atmosphere consonant with some important image - but what? I have not the foggiest idea. I needed a marvelous image, but I did not find it. I went to turn off the light, and when I got out, I literally saw the solution: two pairs of soft clocks, they hang plaintively from an olive branch. Despite the migraine, I prepared my palette and set to work. Two hours later, by the time Gala returned, the most famous of my paintings was finished.
(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, “did I think about Einstein when I painted soft watches ( I mean the theory of relativity. - Approx. ed.). 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 thinking about Heraclitus an ancient Greek philosopher who believed that time is measured by the flow of thought. - Approx. ed.). 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 watch- lie on the left with the dial down - 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 memory of a bathing baby with ants in the anus endowed the artist with the obsessive presence of this insect in his painting. ( “I loved to nostalgically recall this action, which in fact did not take place,” the artist writes in “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, told by himself.” - Approx. ed.). 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 (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 is embodied in rocky granite ( the flow of one delusional image into another. - Approx. ed.)... 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) Sea for 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) Mirror lying horizontally to the left. It is a symbol of variability and inconstancy, obediently reflecting both the subjective and objective world.
Painter
Salvador Dali
The great Spanish artist Salvador Filipe Jacinto Dali i Domenech was born in the spring of 1904, on May 11th at 08:45...
Brief biographical note
1904 Salvador Dali Domanech was born on May 11th in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain.
1910 Dali begins attending Christian Brothers' Immaculate Conception elementary school.
1916 Summer vacation with the Pichot family. Dali encounters modern painting for the first time.
1917 Spanish artist Nunez teaches Dali the techniques of the original engraving.
1919 First exhibition in a group show at the municipal theater in Figueres. Dali is 15 years old.
1921 Death of mother.
1922 Dali passes the entrance exam to the Accademia de San Fernando in Madrid.
1923 Temporary expulsion from the Academy.
1925 First professional solo exhibition at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona.
1926 First trip to Paris and Brussels. Meeting with Picasso. Final exclusion from the Academy.
Leda Atomica 1949Dream inspired by the flight of a bee 1943
The Last Supper 1955
Temptation of Saint Anthony 1946
1929 Collaboration with Louis Buñuel in the production of the film "Andalusian dog". Meeting with Gala Eluard. First exhibition in Paris.
1930 Dalí resides with Gala in Port Ligat, Spain.
1931 Painting "The Persistence of Memory".
1934 Painting "The Riddle of William Tell" Dali quarreled with a group of surrealists. Civil marriage with Gala. Trip to New York. Albert Schira publishes 42 original Dalí engravings.
1936 Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Paintings "Autumn of Cannibalism", "Soft Hours", "Civil War Warning".
1938 Conversation with the sick Sigmund Freud in London. Dali takes part in the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris.
1939 Definitively expelled from the Surrealist group due to Dalí's unwillingness to support their political motives.
1940 Dali and Gala emigrate to America where they live for eight years, first in Virginia, then in California and New York.
1941 Retrospective exhibition with Miro at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
1942 Publication of the autobiography "The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, told by himself."
1946 Participation in the film project "Destino" by Walt Disney. Participation in the Alfred Hitchcock Film Project. Painting "The Temptation of St. Anthony".
1949 Paintings "Leda Atomica" and Madonna Port - Ligat "(version 1). Return to Europe.
1957 Publication of twelve original lithographs by Dalí, titled "Pages of the Quest for Don Quixote of La Mancha".
1958 Wedding of Gala and Dali in Girona, Spain.
1959 Painting "Discovery of America by Columbus".
1962 Dalí enters into a ten-year agreement with publisher Pierre Argille to publish illustrations./>
1965 Dali signs a contract with Sidney Lucas, New York.
1967 Acquisition of Pubol Castle in Girona and rebuilding.
1969 Ceremonial moving into Pubol Castle.
1971 The Salvador Dalí Museum opens in Cleveland, Ohio.
1974 Dali begins to worry about health problems.
1982 Opening of the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. Death Gala at Pubol Castle.
1983 Grand exhibition of Dali's works in Spain, in Madrid and Barcelona. Completion of painting classes. The last painting is "Swallow's Tail".
1989 January 23, Dali died of heart failure. He is buried in the crypt of the Tatro Museum, in Figueres, Spain.
The painting "The Persistence of Memory", 1931.
The most famous and most discussed painting by Salvador Dali among artists. The painting has been in the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1934.
This picture depicts a clock as a symbol of the human experience of time, memory. Here they are shown in large distortions, which our memories sometimes are. Dali did not forget himself, he is also present in the form of a sleeping head, which appears in his other paintings. During this period, Dali constantly displayed the image of a deserted coast, by which he expressed the emptiness within himself.
This void was filled when he saw a piece of Kemember cheese. "... Deciding to write a clock, I wrote them soft.
It was one evening, I was tired, I had a migraine - an extremely rare ailment for me. We were supposed to go to the cinema with friends, but at the last moment I decided to stay at home.
Gala will go with them, and I will go to bed early. We ate very tasty cheese, then I was left alone, sitting, leaning on the table, and thinking about how "super soft" melted cheese is.
I got up and went to the studio to take a look at my work as usual. The picture I was going to paint was a landscape of the outskirts of Port Lligat, rocks, as if illuminated by a dim evening light.
In the foreground, I sketched the chopped off trunk of a leafless olive tree. This landscape is the basis for a canvas with some idea, but what? I needed a marvelous image, but I did not find it.
I went to turn off the light, and when I got out, I literally “saw” the solution: two pairs of soft clocks, one hanging plaintively from an olive branch. Despite the migraine, I prepared my palette and set to work.
Two hours later, when Gala returned from the cinema, the picture, which was to become one of the most famous, was completed.
The painting has become a symbol of the modern concept of the relativity of time. A year after the exhibition in the Paris gallery of Pierre Colet, the painting was bought by the New York Museum of Modern Art.
In the picture, the artist expressed the relativity of time and emphasized the amazing property of human memory, which allows us to be transported again to those days that have long been left in the past.
HIDDEN SYMBOLS
Soft clock on the table
A symbol of non-linear, subjective time, arbitrarily flowing and unevenly filling space. The three clocks in the picture are past, present and future.
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.
Solid clock, lie on the left side of the dial down. Symbol of objective time.
Ants are a symbol of decay and decay. According to Nina Getashvili, a professor at the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, “a childish impression of a wounded bat infested with ants.
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."
Olive.
For the artist, this is a symbol of ancient wisdom, which, unfortunately, has already sunk into oblivion (therefore, the tree is depicted dry).
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. — Approx. ed.) is embodied in rock granite... new - you just need to slightly change the angle of view.
The sea for Dali 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.
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.
Mirror lying horizontally to the left. It is a symbol of variability and inconstancy, obediently reflecting both the subjective and objective world.
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.
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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 more complex category, 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.
Salvador Dali can rightly be called the greatest surrealist. Streams of consciousness, dreams and reality were reflected in all his works. "The Persistence of Memory" is one of the smallest (24x33 cm), but the most discussed paintings. This canvas stands out for its deep subtext and many encrypted symbols. And it is the most copied work of the artist.
Salvador Dali himself said that he created the dials in the picture in two hours. His wife Gala went to the cinema with friends, and the artist stayed at home, citing a headache. Being alone, he examined the room. Here Dali's attention was attracted by Camembert cheese, which he and Gala had recently eaten. It slowly melted in the sun.
Suddenly, the master had an idea, and he went to his studio, where a landscape of the environs of Port Ligat was already painted on canvas. Salvador Dali spread the palette and began to create. By the time the wife arrived home, the picture was ready.
A lot of allusions and metaphors are hidden on a small canvas. Art critics are happy to decipher all the riddles of the Persistence of Memory.
The three clocks represent the present, past and future. Their "melting" form is a symbol of subjective time, unevenly filling space. Another clock with ants crawling on it is linear time that consumes itself. Salvador Dali has repeatedly admitted that in childhood he was strongly impressed by the sight of ants swarming on a dead bat.
A certain spreading object with eyelashes is a self-portrait of Dali. The artist associated the deserted shore with loneliness, and the withered tree with ancient wisdom. On the left in the picture you can see the mirror surface. It can reflect both reality and the world of dreams.
After 20 years, Dali's view of the world has changed. He created a painting called "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory". In concept, it echoed the Persistence of Memory, but the new era of technological progress left its mark on the author's attitude. The dials are gradually disintegrating, and the space is divided into ordered blocks and flooded with water.
Plot
Dali, like a real surrealist, immerses us in the world of dreams with his painting. Fussy, chaotic, mystical and at the same time seeming understandable and real.
On the one hand, the familiar clock, the sea, the rocky landscape, the withered tree. On the other hand, their appearance and proximity to other, poorly identifiable objects leaves one perplexed.
There are three clocks in the picture: past, present and future. The artist followed the ideas of Heraclitus, who believed that time is measured by the flow of thought. A soft clock is a symbol of non-linear, subjective time, arbitrarily flowing and unevenly filling space.
Dali's molten watch was invented while thinking about Camembert
A hard clock infested with ants is linear time that devours itself. The image of insects as a symbol of decay and decay haunted Dali since childhood, when he saw how insects swarm on the carcass of a bat.
But Dali called the flies the fairies of the Mediterranean: "They carried inspiration to the Greek philosophers who spent their lives under the sun, covered in flies."
The artist depicted himself sleeping in the form of a blurry object with eyelashes. “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.”
Salvador Dali
The tree is depicted dry, because, as Dali believed, ancient wisdom (of which this tree is a symbol) has sunk into oblivion.
The deserted shore is the cry of the soul of the artist, who through this image speaks of his emptiness, loneliness and longing. “Here (at Cape Creus in Catalonia - ed.), - he wrote, - the most important principle of my theory of paranoid metamorphoses is embodied in rock granite ... These are frozen clouds reared by an explosion in all their countless guises, more and more - there is only slightly change the angle of view.
At the same time, the sea is a symbol of immortality and eternity. According to Dali, the sea is ideal for traveling, where time flows in accordance with the internal rhythms of consciousness.
Dali took the image of an egg as a symbol of life from the ancient mystics. The latter believed that the first bisexual deity Phanes was born from the World Egg, which created people, and heaven and earth were formed from the two halves of its shell.
A mirror lies horizontally on the left. It reflects everything you want: both the real world and dreams. For Dali, the mirror is a symbol of impermanence.
Context
According to a legend invented by Dali himself, he created the image of a flowing clock in just two hours: “We were supposed to go to the cinema with friends, but at the last moment I decided to stay at home. Gala will go with them, and I will go to bed early. We ate very tasty cheese, then I was left alone, sitting leaning on the table and thinking about how “super soft” processed cheese is. I got up and went to the studio to take a look at my work as usual. The picture I was going to paint was a landscape of the outskirts of Port Lligat, rocks, as if illuminated by a dim evening light. In the foreground, I sketched the chopped off trunk of a leafless olive tree. This landscape is the basis for a canvas with some idea, but what? I needed a marvelous image, but I did not find it. I went to turn off the light, and when I got out, I literally “saw” the solution: two pairs of soft clocks, one hanging plaintively from an olive branch. Despite the migraine, I prepared my palette and set to work. Two hours later, when Gala returned from the cinema, the picture, which was to become one of the most famous, was completed.
Gala: no one will be able to forget these soft clocks after seeing them at least once
After 20 years, the picture was built into a new concept - "Disintegration of Memory Persistence". The iconic image is surrounded by nuclear mysticism. Soft dials quietly disintegrate, the world is divided into clear blocks, the space is under water. The 1950s, with post-war reflection and technical progress, obviously plowed Dali.
"The Disintegration of Memory Persistence"
Dali is buried in such a way that anyone can walk on his grave
Creating all this diversity, Dali also invented himself - from mustaches to hysterical behavior. He saw how many talented people who were not noticed. Therefore, the artist regularly reminded himself of himself in the most eccentric possible manner.
Dali on the roof of his house in Spain
Even Dali's death was turned into a performance: according to his will, he was to be buried so that people could walk on the grave. Which was done after his death in 1989. Today, Dali's body is buried in the floor in one of the rooms of his house in Figueres.
