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".
(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 a soft watch (meaning 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 I thought 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 actually did not happen,” 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) Olive. 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 (the flow of one delusional image into another. - Approx. ed.) is embodied in rock granite... new ones - 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.
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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. |
Photo: M.FLYNN/ALAMY/DIOMEDIA, CARL VAN VECHTEN/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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", "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, he designated conscious and active memory in the form of a mechanical clock and ants fussing 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.
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.
Salvador Dali. The Persistence of Memory. 1931 24x33 cm Museum of Modern Art, New York (MOMA)
A melting clock is a very recognizable image of Dali. Even more recognizable than an egg or a nose with lips.
Remembering Dali, we willy-nilly think about the painting "The Persistence of Memory".
What is the secret of such a success of the picture? Why did she become the hallmark of the artist?
Let's try to figure it out. And at the same time, we will carefully consider all the details.
"Permanence of memory" - something to think about
Salvador Dali's many works are unique. Due to the unusual combination of details. It encourages the viewer to ask questions. Why is it all? What did the artist want to say?
The Persistence of Memory is no exception. She immediately provokes a person to think. Because the image of the current watch is very catchy.
But not only the clock makes you think. The whole picture is saturated with many contradictions.
Let's start with color. There are many shades of brown in the picture. They are hot, which enhances the feeling of emptiness.
But this hot space is diluted with cold blue. Such are watch dials, the sea and the surface of a huge mirror.
Salvador Dali. Persistence of memory (detail with a dry tree). 1931 Museum of Modern Art, New York
The curvature of the dials and the branches of dry wood are in stark contrast to the straight lines of the table and the mirror.
We also see the opposition of real and unreal things. A dry tree is real, but the clock melting on it is not. The sea is real. But a mirror the size of it is unlikely to be found in our world.
Such a mixture of everything and everything leads to different thoughts. Think about the change in the world. And about the fact that time does not come, but goes. And about the neighborhood of reality and sleep in our lives.
Everyone will think, even if they do not know anything about Dali's work.
Dali's interpretation
Dali himself commented little on his masterpiece. He only said that the image of a melting watch was inspired by cheese spreading in the sun. And when painting a picture, he thought about the teachings of Heraclitus.
This ancient thinker said that everything in the world is changeable and has a dual nature. Well, there is more than enough duality in The Persistence of Time.
But why exactly did the artist name his painting? Maybe because he believed in the permanence of memory. In that, only the memory of some events and people can be preserved, despite the passage of time.
But we don't know the exact answer. This is the beauty of this masterpiece. You can struggle over the riddles of the picture for as long as you like, but you won’t find all the answers.
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On that day in July 1931, Dali had an interesting image of a melting watch in his head. But all other images have already been used by him in other works. They migrated to The Persistence of Memory.
Maybe that's why the film is so successful. Because this is a piggy bank of the most successful images of the artist.
Dali even drew his favorite egg. Although somewhere in the background.
Salvador Dali. Persistence of memory (fragment). 1931 Museum of Modern Art, New York Of course, on the "Geopolitical Child" it is a close-up. But both there and there, the egg carries the same symbolism - change, the birth of something new. Again, according to Heraclitus.
Salvador Dali. geopolitical child. 1943 Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA In the same fragment of The Persistence of Memory, a close-up shows the mountains. This is Cape Creus near his hometown of Figueres. Dali liked to transfer memories from his childhood to his paintings. So this landscape, familiar to him from birth, roams from picture to picture.
Dali self-portrait
Of course, a strange creature still catches your eye. It is, like a clock, fluid and formless. This is Dali's self-portrait.
We see a closed eye with huge eyelashes. Protruding long and thick tongue. He is clearly unconscious or not feeling well. Still, in such heat, when even the metal melts.
Salvador Dali. Persistence of memory (detail with self-portrait). 1931 Museum of Modern Art, New York Is this a metaphor for wasted time? Or a human shell that lived its life meaninglessly?
Personally, I associate this head with Michelangelo's self-portrait from the Last Judgment fresco. The master portrayed himself in a peculiar way. In the form of loose skin.
To take a similar image is quite in the spirit of Dali. After all, his work was distinguished by frankness, a desire to show all his fears and desires. The image of a man with flayed skin suited him perfectly.
Michelangelo. Terrible Judgment. Fragment. 1537-1541 Sistine Chapel, Vatican In general, such a self-portrait is a frequent occurrence in Dali's paintings. Close-up we see him on the canvas "The Great Masturbator".
Salvador Dali. Great masturbator. 1929 Reina Sofia Art Center, Madrid And now we can already draw a conclusion about another secret to the success of the picture. All the pictures given for comparison have one feature. Like many other works of Dali.
juicy details
There is a lot of sexual overtones in Dali's works. You can't just show them to an audience under 16. And you can't depict them on posters either. Otherwise, they will be accused of insulting the feelings of passers-by. How did it happen with reproductions.
But "The Persistence of Memory" is quite innocent. Replicate as much as you want. And in schools, show them in art classes. And print on mugs with T-shirts.
It's hard not to pay attention to insects. A fly sits on one dial. On the inverted red clock - ants.
Salvador Dali. Persistence of memory (detail). 1931 Museum of Modern Art, New York Ants are also frequent guests in the master's paintings. We see them on the same "Masturbator". They swarm on locusts and around the mouth.
Salvador Dali. Great masturbator (fragment). 1929 Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA Ants in Dali were associated with decay and death after an extremely unpleasant incident in childhood. One day he saw ants eating the corpse of a bat.
It is precisely for this that the artist depicted them on the clock. Like eating time. The fly is most likely depicted with the same meaning. This is a reminder to people that time is running out without a return.
Summarize
So what is the secret to the success of The Persistence of Memory? Personally, I found 5 explanations for this phenomenon for myself:
- A very memorable image of a melting watch.
The picture makes you think. Even if you know little about Dali's work.
– The picture contains all the most interesting images of the artist (egg, self-portrait, insects). This is not counting the clock itself.
- The picture is devoid of sexual overtones. It can be shown to any person on this Earth. Even the smallest one.
- All the symbols of the picture are not fully deciphered. And we can guess over them endlessly. This is the strength of all masterpieces.
