PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY: Salvador Dali, 32 X 24

Rating:
Summary: Salvador Dali's famous painting with the melting watches
Review: I think I could make a compelling argument that Salvador Dalí's "The Persistence of Memory" is the most famous painting of the 20th century. Certainly it is his most memorable Surrealist work and the one that he is most often associated with in the popular mind. In addition to the typical Dalinian landscape there is what appears to be an amorphous self-portrait of the artist that is melting along with three of the more watches that provide a literal representation of the irrelevance of time.

Dalí's inspiration for the famous image of the melting clocks was some Camembert cheese that had gone all soft and runny. Having completed the background of the painting, which shows the beach near his hometown of Port Lligat and the craggy rocks of Cape Creus, Dalí needed something for the foreground and came up with the idea of the melting clocks. Biographers have speculated that the artist had been spending a pleasant summer with no real sense of how time was passing and that this explains the psychological meaning of the images.

This 32 x 24 inch print is actually a lot bigger than the original oil on canvas painting of "The Persistence of Memory," which measures 9 1/2 x 13 inches and is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Two decades later in "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory" (1952-54) Dalí revisited his favorite work showing how, in his own words, "After twenty years of immobility, the soft watches are themselves dynamically disintegrating." The melting watches reappear in other Dalí works, which only serves to reinforce their ironic significance for both the artist and the Surrealist movement.

Rating:
Summary: Salvador Dali's famous painting with the melting watches
Review: I think I could make a compelling argument that Salvador Dalí's "The Persistence of Memory" is the most famous painting of the 20th century. Certainly it is his most memorable Surrealist work and the one that he is most often associated with in the popular mind. In addition to the typical Dalinian landscape there is what appears to be an amorphous self-portrait of the artist that is melting along with three of the more watches that provide a literal representation of the irrelevance of time.

Dalí's inspiration for the famous image of the melting clocks was some Camembert cheese that had gone all soft and runny. Having completed the background of the painting, which shows the beach near his hometown of Port Lligat and the craggy rocks of Cape Creus, Dalí needed something for the foreground and came up with the idea of the melting clocks. Biographers have speculated that the artist had been spending a pleasant summer with no real sense of how time was passing and that this explains the psychological meaning of the images.

This 32 x 24 inch print is actually a lot bigger than the original oil on canvas painting of "The Persistence of Memory," which measures 9 1/2 x 13 inches and is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Two decades later in "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory" (1952-54) Dalí revisited his favorite work showing how, in his own words, "After twenty years of immobility, the soft watches are themselves dynamically disintegrating." The melting watches reappear in other Dalí works, which only serves to reinforce their ironic significance for both the artist and the Surrealist movement.