The Persistence of Memory
Melting pocket watches in a desolate landscape on the coast of Catalonia. The picture is only 24 × 33 cm but has become the symbol of Surrealism.
The details are painted with the precision of the Old Masters – that is what makes the dream convincing.
Salvador Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory in 1931. He had joined the Surrealists in Paris a few years earlier and lived part of the time at Port Lligat on the Catalan coast with Gala, who later became his wife. The painting is very small, about 24 × 33 centimetres. It is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The picture contains three soft, melting pocket watches. One hangs over the branch of a dead tree, one droops over the edge of a table or box, and one lies across a strange, pale creature in the middle of the picture. A fourth watch, its lid closed, lies on the table covered in ants. In the background are cliffs in golden light and a still sea.
The creature in the middle has been interpreted as a distorted profile of Dalí’s own face, with a long nose and a closed eye with long lashes. Similar forms appear in other paintings of his from the same period. The cliffs in the background have been identified as Cap de Creus on the Catalan coast, a landscape Dalí returned to many times.
The light is clear and strong, as in early morning or late afternoon. The colours are muted browns, yellows and blues, with sharp shadows. Dalí painted in oil on canvas with very fine brushes and almost invisible brushstrokes. He admired Old Masters such as Vermeer and wanted to paint dream images with the same meticulousness.
Dalí described a method he called the paranoiac-critical. It involved letting irrational associations govern the image while painting it with great precision. He himself said that the idea for the soft watches came to him when he saw a Camembert melting in the heat. Such claims come from Dalí’s own, often self-aggrandising, accounts and should be treated with caution.
The watches have been interpreted as an image of time losing its solidity in dreams or in memory. The ants have been seen as symbols of decay, which Dalí often used. Some have linked the picture to the new theories of time in physics, but Dalí himself rejected that interpretation. The picture has no single explanation.
The painting was shown in New York in 1932 and given to the Museum of Modern Art by an anonymous donor in 1934. It quickly became one of the best-known images of Surrealism. Dalí returned to the motif in the 1950s in The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory. Melting clocks have since become a fixture of popular culture. The painting also made Dalí famous in the United States, where he later spent the war years.