Persistence Of Memory, The

Salvador Dalí: The Persistence of Memory

The Persistence of Memory, painting by Salvador Dali completed in 1931.

Dalí was a Catalan Spanish artist who became one of the most important painters of the 20th century. He was also an accomplished sculptor, draftsman, and designer whose imagery came to influence not only the art world but also fashion, advertising, theater, and film. He is best known for his Surrealist work. In 1922 he went to study in Madrid at the Residencia de Estudiantes, initiating lifelong artistic partnerships with men such as Luis Buñuel, with whom he made the film Un Chien Andalou (1922), as well as Frederico García Lorca. Dalí divided his time between his birthplace in Catalonia and Paris and New York, gaining wealth and fame as the Spanish artist who added a Surrealist touch to film and theater sets.

The Persistence of Memory, also known as Soft Watches or Melting Clocks, is one of Dalí’s most famous pieces. Several of his favorite recurring images are present in this work. The setting is one he often used: the seashore of Catalonia at Cape Creus. His melting-clock imagery mocks the rigidity of chronometric time. The watches themselves look like soft cheese—indeed, by Dalí’s own account they were inspired by hallucinations after eating Camembert cheese. (He used a process he called the “paranoiac critical method,”: he deliberately provoked hallucinations as a path to his own subsconcious.)  In the center of the picture, under one of the watches, is a distorted human face in profile, an image that also appears in his earlier work The Great Masturbator (1929). The ants on the plate represent decay.

The Persistence of Memory was first exhibited in New York in 1932 and sold for $250.