“The Persistence of Memory”: Explained
Dalí defined his work as “hand-painted photographs of dreams”, his attention to detail combined with his hyper realistic style gave to the idea that he employed extra fine brushes as well a jeweler’s magnifying glass in order to do all the details in his paintings.
The Persistence of Memory, 1931, © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala - Salvador Dalí.
Dali’s most famous painting, despite the huge success it had, is in fact, quite small. Measuring only 33 cm (wide) x 24 cm (tall) this is actually one of Dali´s smaller paintings.
It was made in the following years of Dali’s arrival to Paris and meeting André Breton, Max Ernst and the rest of the Surrealists. When he completed it he felt it was an extraordinary piece, but that it wouldn’t be of the likes of the people, and that it would never sell. Despite this, The Persistence of Memory sold, and then sealed Dali’s fame in the United States which settled the foundations for his fortune and success.
At the time, artists were painting these arid and often desolated landscapes, many times with some sort of ruins or abandoned building to accentuate the desolation of the scene. This was during an in between wars period, in which people were still recovering from the destruction and loss caused by World War I.
Dalí defined his work as “hand-painted photographs of dreams”, his attention to detail combined with his hyper realistic style gave birth to the idea that he employed extra fine brushes as well a jeweler’s magnifying glass in order to do all the details in his paintings. This, like the rest of the paintings he made from 1931, was done using what Dali called his Paranoid Critical Method.
La torre e il treno, 1934, © Giorgio de Chirico, Fair Use.
“The subconscious has a symbolic language that is truly a universal language, for it speaks with the vocabulary of the great vital constants, sexual instinct, feeling of death, physical notion of the enigma of space—these vital constants are universally echoed in every human. To understand an aesthetic picture, training in the appreciation is necessary, cultural and intellectual preparation. For Surrealism the only pre requisite is a receptive and intuitive human being”
Paranoid Critical Method
Paranoia is a delirium in our interpretation of reality, causing a feeling of constant and unsupported mistrust in the world and people around you, it makes every thing perceived to confirm the reality that the mind is experiencing. It is characterized by the flow of delirious and strange ideas without the presence of any other mental condition.
The Paranoid Critical Method was created by Dali himself in the early 1930s and he used it throughout his entire career. It is meant to help artists, or anyone for that matter, to tap into their subconscious by the use of a self-induced paranoid state and systematic irrational thought. Dali proposed this technique as a mean to explore a second phase of Surrealism which, in contrast to the first phase, would seek to consciously exploit the explorations of the unconscious rather than trying to just reveal what goes on inside of the mind by unconscious and automatic creation. After having this self-induced paranoid state, Dali would then paint what he had experienced.
By entering this state one can let go of their previous ideas, and the basic understanding of reality in order to see the world in new, and more unique ways. In artistic terms, it is the creation of new and at times irrational objects to prove and depict an unprovable worldview. Dali believed that when people viewed his work, there was an underlying understanding of his work as he believed that the subconscious has a symbolic, and universal language based on our most primal instincts and desires. He believed that by simply viewing his work it would evoke the mind of the viewer to experience unconscious acts and move the necessary strings for the message to be understood by the deeper parts of our mind.
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Clocks often represent the pass of time, permanence, and memory. Time, which had always been viewed as an absolute of nature, had just had that title revoked by Einstein's theory of relativity which stated that time is something can be bent, and altered not only in our perception, but in nature itself.
3 melting or soft clocks on the painting represent time's deterioration, the lack of permanence of things, and the “Camembert of time” as Dali referred to it after watching how a piece of cheese appeared as if it was melting on his plate.
Next to one of the clocks, we can see a golden watch covered in ants. Insects throughout Dali’s career stand as a memento mori, and a symbol of putrefaction. This association can be traced to his infancy when he saw a bunch of ants devouring an animal’s corpse.
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Olive trees are symbols of peace, abundance and prosperity, and also they are pretty common in Catalonia, where Dali was raised. The painting was made a few years prior to the Spanish Civil War, and during a period of great political and cultural turmoil in Spain.
Here we are shown a dead olive tree in the foreground, accentuating the desolated state of the landscape.
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A melting face appears on what it seems to be a rock formation. It is uncertain as to whose face it is however, it is thought to be a self portrait since similar faces, but with more resemblance to Dali, had already appeared in The Enigma of My Desire, and The Great Masturbator both from 1929. Also, the rock formation resembles the coast of Cadaques, where Dali would spend most of his life.
The long eyelashes and the overly fleshy tongue of the face may be a reference to the being's erotism.
Dali always had a nostalgic sense, throughout his career, in his journals, and interviews he gave we can see references, and entries that talk about his love for Spain. This painting was made after Dali came back to Spain, following him living in Paris for about 2 years along with the rest of the Surrealists, and experienced the political turmoil the country was living in the years prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
The piece can ultimately be interpreted as a reflection of Dali’s own feelings of angst, and anxiety about what the future held for Spain, specially for the region where he grew up, and its culture. It can be seen as a representation of his own fear for his motherland, and his attempts to preserve as much of his infancy, the peace he experienced during it, and the places he spent it on, at least in his memory, a place exempt of time, but doomed to degrade with the passage of it nonetheless.
The Persistence of Memory, 1931, © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala - Salvador Dalí.
The Persistence of Memory is a permanent piece of the Museum of Modern Art’s collection in New York. Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it.
