Salvador Dali - Persistence of memory (Spanish: La persistencia de la memoria).
Year of establishment: 1931
Canvas, handmade tapestry.
Original size: 24×33cm
Museum of Modern Art, New York
« The Persistence of Memory”(Spanish: La persistencia de la memoria, 1931) is one of the most famous paintings by the artist Salvador Dali. It has been in the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1934.
Also known as " soft watch», « Hardness of memory" or " Memory Persistence».
This small painting (24×33 cm) is probably Dali's most famous work. The softness of the hanging and flowing clock is an image that could be described as "it spreads into the realm of the unconscious, enlivening the universal human experience of time and memory." Dali himself is present here in the form of a sleeping head, which has already appeared in The Funeral Game and other paintings. In accordance with his method, the artist explained the origin of the plot by thinking about the nature of Camembert cheese; the landscape with Port Ligat was already ready, so it was a matter of two hours to paint the picture. Returning from the cinema, where she went that evening, Gala quite correctly predicted that no one, having seen The Persistence of Memory once, would forget it. The picture was painted as a result of the associations that arose in Dali at the sight of processed cheese, as evidenced by his own quote.
Description of the painting by Salvador Dali “The Persistence of Memory”
The greatest representative of surrealism in painting, Salvador Dali, truly skillfully combined mystery and evidence. This amazing Spanish artist executed his paintings in a manner inherent only to him, sharpened life's questions with the help of an original and opposite combination of real and fantastic.
One of the most famous paintings, known by several names, is most often found - "The Persistence of Memory", but is also known as "Soft Hours", "The Hardness of Memory" or "The Persistence of Memory".
This is a very small picture of time arbitrarily flowing and unevenly filling space. The artist himself explained that the emergence of this plot is associated with associations when thinking about the nature of processed cheese.
It all starts with a landscape, it takes up little space on the canvas. In the distance one can see the desert and the sea coast, perhaps this is a reflection of the inner emptiness of the artist. There are still three clocks in the picture, but they are flowing. This is a temporary space through which the flow of life flows, but it can change.
Most of the artist's paintings, their ideas, content, subtext, became known from the notes in the diaries of Salvador Dali. But what is the opinion of the artist himself about this picture is not found, not a single line. There are many opinions about what the artist wanted to convey to us. There are some so contradictory that this saggy watch speaks of Dali's fears, perhaps in front of any male problems. But, despite all these assumptions, the picture is very popular, thanks to the originality of the surrealist direction.
Most often, the word surrealism refers to Dali, and his painting “The Persistence of Memory” comes to mind. Now this work is in New York, you can see it at the Museum of Modern Art.
The idea for the work came to Dali on a hot summer day. He lay at home with a headache, and Gala went shopping. After eating, Dali noticed that the cheese melted from the heat, became fluid. It somehow coincided with what Dali had in his soul. The artist had a desire to paint a landscape with a melting clock. He returned to the unfinished painting he was working on at the time, which showed a tree on a platform with mountains in the background. Within two or three hours, Salvador Dali hung a melted pocket watch on the painting, which made the painting what it is today.
Salvador Dali
The Persistence of Memory 1931
History of creation
It was the summer of 1931 in Paris, when Dali was preparing for a solo exhibition. After spending Gala with friends at the cinema, “I,” writes Dali 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.
One of the most famous paintings written in the genre of surrealism is "The Persistence of Memory". Salvador Dali, the author of this painting, created it in just a few hours. The canvas is now in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art. This small painting, measuring only 24 by 33 centimeters, is the most discussed work of the artist.
Name Explanation
Salvador Dali's painting "The Persistence of Memory" was painted in 1931 on a handmade tapestry canvas. The idea of creating this canvas was due to the fact that once, while waiting for the return of his wife Gala from the cinema, Salvador Dali painted an absolutely desert landscape of the sea coast. Suddenly, he saw on the table a piece of cheese melting in the sun, which they ate in the evening with friends. The cheese melted and became softer and softer. Thinking and connecting the long running time with a melting piece of cheese, Dali began to fill the canvas with spreading clocks. Salvador Dali called his work “The Persistence of Memory”, explaining the name by the fact that once you look at the picture, you will never forget it. Another name for the painting is "Flowing hours". This name is associated with the content of the canvas itself, which Salvador Dali put into it.
"The Persistence of Memory": a description of the painting
When you look at this canvas, the unusual placement and structure of the depicted objects immediately catches your eye. The picture shows the self-sufficiency of each of them and the general feeling of emptiness. There are a lot of seemingly unrelated items here, but they all create a general impression. What did Salvador Dali depict in the painting "The Persistence of Memory"? The description of all items takes up quite a lot of space.
The atmosphere of the painting "The Persistence of Memory"
Salvador Dali completed the painting in brown tones. The general shadow lies on the left side and middle of the picture, the sun falls on the back and right side of the canvas. The picture seems to be filled with quiet horror and fear of such calmness, and at the same time, a strange atmosphere fills The Persistence of Memory. Salvador Dali with this canvas makes you think about the meaning of time in the life of every person. About how, can time stop? And can it adapt to each of us? Probably, everyone should give himself the answers to these questions.
It is a known fact that the artist always left notes about his paintings in his diary. However, Salvador Dali did not say anything about the most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory. The great artist initially understood that by painting this picture, he would make people think about the frailty of being in this world.
The influence of the canvas on a person
Salvador Dali's painting "The Persistence of Memory" was considered by American psychologists, who came to the conclusion that this painting has a strong psychological impact on certain types of human personalities. Many people, looking at this painting by Salvador Dali, described their feelings. Most of the people were immersed in nostalgia, the rest were trying to deal with the mixed emotions of general horror and thoughtfulness caused by the composition of the picture. The canvas conveys feelings, thoughts, experiences and attitudes towards the “softness and hardness” of the artist himself.
Of course, this picture is small in size, but it can be considered one of the greatest and most powerful psychological paintings by Salvador Dali. The painting "The Persistence of Memory" carries the greatness of the classics of surrealistic painting.
Even if you don't know who painted The Persistence of Memory, you've definitely seen it. Soft watches, dry wood, sandy brown colors are recognizable attributes of the canvas of the surrealist Salvador Dali. Date of creation - 1931, painted in oil on canvas handmade. Small size - 24x33 cm. Storage location - Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Dali's work is saturated with a challenge to the usual logic, the natural order of things. The artist suffered from a mental disorder of a borderline nature, bouts of paranoid delirium, which was reflected in all his works. The Persistence of Memory is no exception. The picture has become a symbol of changeability, the fragility of time, contains a hidden meaning, which can be interpreted by letters, notes, autobiography of a surrealist.
Dali treated the canvas with special trepidation, investing personal meaning. This attitude towards a miniature work completed in just two hours is an important factor that contributed to its popularity. The laconic Dali, after creating his “Soft Watches”, spoke about them quite often, recalled the history of creation in his autobiography, explained the meaning of the elements in correspondence, records. Art historians who collected references, thanks to this canvas, were able to conduct a deeper analysis of the rest of the works of the famous surrealist.
Description of the picture
The image of melting dials is familiar to everyone, but not everyone will remember the detailed description of Salvador Dali's painting "The Persistence of Memory", and they will not even look closely at some important elements. In this composition, every element, color scheme, and general atmosphere matter.
The picture is painted in brown colors with the addition of blue. Transfers to the hot coast - a solid rocky cape is located in the background, by the sea. Near the cape you can see the egg. Closer to the middle plan is a mirror turned upside down with a smooth surface.
In the middle ground is a withered olive tree, from the broken branch of which hangs a flexible clock face. Nearby is the image of the author - a creature blurred like a mollusk with a closed eye and eyelashes. On top of the element is another flexible clock.
The third soft dial hangs from the corner of the surface on which the dry tree grows. In front of him is the only solid clock of the entire composition. They are turned upside down, on the surface of the back there are numerous ants, forming the shape of a chronometer. The picture leaves a lot of empty spaces that do not need to be filled with additional artistic details.
The same image was taken as the basis of the painting "The Decay of the Persistence of Memory", painted in 1952-54. The surrealist added other elements to it - another flexible dial, fish, branches, lots of water. This picture continues, and complements, and contrasts with the first.
History of creation
The history of the creation of Salvador Dali's painting "The Persistence of Memory" is as non-trivial as the entire biography of the surrealist. In the summer of 1931, Dali was in Paris preparing to open a personal exhibition of his works. Waiting for the return of Gala from the cinema, his common-law wife, who had a huge influence on his work, the artist at the table was thinking about melting cheese. That evening part of their dinner was Camembert cheese, melted under the influence of heat. The surrealist, suffering from a headache, visited the workshop before going to bed, where he worked on a beach landscape bathed in sunset light. In the foreground of the canvas, the skeleton of a dry olive tree was already depicted.
The atmosphere of the picture in the mind of Dali turned out to be consonant with other important images. That evening, he imagined a soft watch hanging from a broken branch of a tree. Work on the painting was continued immediately, despite the evening migraine. Took two hours. When Gala returned, the most famous work of the Spanish artist was completely completed.
The artist's wife argued that once you see the canvas, how to forget the image will not work. Its creation was facilitated by the changeable shape of cheese and the theory of creating paranoid symbols, which Dalí associates with the view of Cape Creus. This cape wandered from one work of the surrealist to another, symbolizing the inviolability of personal theory.
Later, the artist reworked the idea into a new canvas, called "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory." Water is hanging on a branch here, and the elements are disintegrating. Even dials that are constant in their flexibility are slowly melting, and the surrounding world is divided into mathematically clear precise blocks.
secret meaning
To understand the secret meaning of the canvas "Permanence of Memory", you will need to look at each attribute of the image separately.
They symbolize non-linear time that fills space with a contradictory flow. For Dali, the connection between time and space was obvious; he did not consider this idea revolutionary. Soft dials are also associated with the ideas of the philosopher of antiquity Heraclitus about the measurement of time by the flow of thought. Dali thought about the Greek thinker and his ideas when creating a picture, which he admitted in a letter to the physicist Ilya Prigogine.
There are three flowing dials. This is a symbol of the past, present and future, mixed into a single space, talking about an obvious relationship.
solid watch
A symbol of the constancy of the flow of time, as opposed to soft hours. They are covered with ants, which the artist associates with decay, death, decay. Ants create the form of a chronometer, obey the structure, never ceasing to symbolize decay. Ants haunted the artist from childhood memories and delusional fantasies, they were obsessively present everywhere. Dali argued that linear time devours itself on its own, he could not do without ants in this concept.
Blurred face with eyelashes
Surrealistic self-portrait of the author, immersed in the viscous world of dreams and the human unconscious. The blurry eye with eyelashes is closed - the artist is sleeping. He is defenseless, in the unconscious nothing holds him down. The shape resembles a mollusk, devoid of a solid skeleton. Salvador said that he was defenseless, like an oyster without a shell, himself. His protective shell was Gala, who had died earlier. The dream was called by the artist the death of reality, so the world of the picture becomes more pessimistic from this.
olive tree
A dry tree with a broken branch is an olive tree. A symbol of antiquity, again reminiscent of the ideas of Heraclitus. The dryness of the tree, the absence of foliage and olives, suggests that the age of ancient wisdom has passed and forgotten, sunk into oblivion.
Other elements
The picture also contains the World Egg, symbolizing life. The image is borrowed from ancient Greek mystics, Orphic mythology. The sea is immortality, eternity, the best space for any travel in the real and imaginary worlds. Cape Creus on the Catalan coast, not far from the author's home, is the embodiment of Dali's theory about the flow of delusional images into other delusional images. The fly on the nearest dial is a Mediterranean fairy that inspired ancient philosophers. The horizontal mirror behind is the impermanence of the subjective and objective worlds.
Color spectrum
Brown sand tones prevail, creating a hot atmosphere. They are contrasted with cold blue shades that soften the pessimistic mood of the composition. The color scheme adjusts to a melancholic mood, becomes the basis for the feeling of sadness that remains after viewing the picture.
General composition
The analysis of the painting "The Persistence of Memory" should be completed by considering the overall composition. Dali is accurate in detail, leaving a sufficient amount of empty space not filled with objects. This allows you to concentrate on the mood of the canvas, find your own meaning, interpret it personally, without "dissecting" every smallest element.
The size of the canvas is small, which indicates the personal significance of the composition for the artist. The whole composition allows you to immerse yourself in the inner world of the author, to better understand his experiences. "Memory Persistence" also known as "Soft Clock" does not require logical parsing. Analyzing this masterpiece of world art in the genre of surrealism, it is required to include associative thinking, a stream of consciousness.
CategoryS. Dali. 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 watch, lying 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 ones - 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.
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Reviews
One has to regret that Salvador Dali did not paint, but only painted objects for a photograph, although he gives this explanation why he did just that in his "Diary of a Genius", but this work can hardly be considered successful, it costs exactly as much as she expended mental effort. A large dark, simply painted over field creates an undesirable effect of being unoccupied, and even a lying head does not give impetus to comprehend the essence of the idea. Using dreams in his work, as he did, is a good thing, but does not always lead to brilliant results.
My attitude towards creativity was ambiguous. At one time I visited his homeland in the city of Figueres in Spain. There is a large museum there, which he himself created, many of his works. This made an impression on me. Later, I read his biography, reviewed his works and wrote several articles about his work.
I don’t like this kind of painting, but it’s interesting. So I just perceive his work as a special phenomenon in painting.
It must be assumed that he, like any artist, has different works: those that are flagship and just ordinary ones. If by the first we judge the pinnacle of skill, then the others are essentially routine work and you can’t do without it. Perhaps a dozen of Dali's works are exactly those with which you can enter the top ten most-most in the world in the section of surrealism. To many, he is an example and inspirer of this direction.
What amazes me in his work is not skill, but fantasy. Some of the paintings are simply repulsive, but it’s interesting to figure out what he wanted to say. There is one composition with lips in the museum, something similar to theatrical scenery. You can also look at the museum at this link and some work. By the way, he is buried in this museum.
In 1931 he painted a picture "The Persistence of Time" , which is often abbreviated simply as "The Clock". The picture has an unusual, strange, outlandish, like all the work of this artist, the plot and in truth is a masterpiece of Salvador Dali's work. What is the meaning of the artist in "The Persistence of Time" and what can all these melting clocks depicted in the picture mean?
The meaning of the painting "The Persistence of Time" by the surrealist artist Salvador Dali is not easy to understand. The painting depicts four clocks, located in a prominent place, against the backdrop of a desert landscape. Although it is a little strange, the watch does not have the usual forms that we are used to seeing them. Here they are not flat, but bend to the shape of the objects on which they lie. There is an association, as if they are melting. It becomes clear that we have a picture in front of us, made in the style of classical surrealism, which raises some questions in the viewer, such as, for example: “why are the clocks melting”, “why are the clocks in the desert” and “where are all the people”?
Pictures of the surrealist genre, appearing before the viewer in their best artistic representation, aim to convey to him the dreams of the artist. Glancing at any picture of this genre, it may seem that its author is a schizophrenic who combined the incompatible in it, where places, people, objects, landscapes are intertwined in combinations and combinations that defy logic. Arguing over the meaning of the painting “The Persistence of Time”, the first thing that comes to mind is that Dali captured his dream on it.
If "The Persistence of Time" depicts a dream, then melting, clocks that have lost their forms indicate the elusiveness of time spent in a dream. After all, when we wake up, we are not surprised that we went to bed in the evening, and it is already morning, and we are not surprised that it is no longer evening. When we are awake, we feel the passage of time, and when we sleep, we refer this time to another reality. There are many interpretations of the painting "The Persistence of Memory". If we look at art through the prism of a dream, then the distorted clock has no power in the world of dreams, and therefore melts.
In the painting “The Persistence of Time”, the author wants to say how useless, meaningless and arbitrary our perception of time is in a state of sleep. While awake, we are constantly worried, nervous, rushing and fussing, trying to get as many things done as possible. Many art critics argue about what kind of clock it is: wall or pocket, which was a very fashionable accessory in the 20s and 30s, the era of surrealism, the peak of their creativity. Surrealists ridiculed many things, objects belonging to the middle class, whose representatives attached too much importance to them, took them too seriously. In our case, this is a clock - a thing that only shows what time it is.
Many art historians believe that Dali painted this painting on the subject of Albert Einstein's theory of probability, which was hotly and excitedly discussed in the thirties. Einstein put forward a theory that shook the belief that time is an immutable quantity. With these melting clocks, Dali shows us that clocks, both wall and pocket, have become primitive, obsolete and now an attribute of little importance.
In any case, the painting "The Persistence of Time" is one of the most famous works of art by Salvador Dali, which, in truth, has become an icon of surrealism of the twentieth century. We guess, interpret, analyze, suppose what meaning could the author himself put into this picture? Each simple viewer or professional art critic has his own perception of this picture. How many of them - so many assumptions. We will no longer know the true meaning of the painting "The Persistence of Time". Dali said that his paintings carry various semantic themes: social, artistic, historical and autobiographical. It can be assumed that "Time Persistence" is a combination of them.
