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Salvador was given a constancy of memory with a brief description of the painting. Salvador Dali Persistence of memory (soft watch): description, meaning, history of creation

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 contemporary art, NY.

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 variability, the fragility of time, contains hidden meaning, which helps to interpret 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 - important factor, which 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 detailed description paintings by Salvador Dali "The Persistence of Memory" will not be remembered by everyone, and some important elements will not even be looked closely at. In this composition, every element, color scheme, and general atmosphere matter.

Painted a picture brown paints 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 from the cinema Gala, his civil wife, which had a huge impact 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. On foreground canvas already depicted the skeleton of a dry olive tree.

The atmosphere of the picture in the mind of Dali turned out to be consonant with other important images. That evening, he imagined that from a broken branch of a tree dangling soft watch. Work on the painting was continued immediately, despite the evening migraine. Took two hours. When Gala returned, the most famous work 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 slowly melt, and the world is divided into mathematically clear precise blocks.

secret meaning

For understanding secret meaning canvas "The Persistence 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 of 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 personal meaning compositions 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, the stream of consciousness.

1. "Ghost of Vermeer of Delft, which can be used as a table", 1934

This small picture with quite a long original title embodies Dali's admiration for the great 17th-century Flemish master, Jan Vermeer. Vermeer's self-portrait is executed taking into account Dali's surrealistic vision.

2. "The Great Masturbator", 1929

The painting depicts the internal struggle of feelings caused by the attitude towards sexual intercourse. This perception of the artist arose as an awakened childhood memory when he saw a book left by his father, open to a page depicting genitals affected by venereal diseases.

3. "Giraffe on fire", 1937

The artist completed this work before moving to the USA in 1940. Although the master claimed that the painting was apolitical, it, like many others, reflects the deep and unsettling feelings of unease and horror that Dali must have experienced during the turbulent period between the two world wars. A certain part reflects his internal struggle in relation to civil war in Spain, and also refers to Freud's method of psychological analysis.

4. "The Face of War", 1940

The agony of war is also reflected in the work of Dali. He believed that his painting should contain omens of war, which we see in a deadly head stuffed with skulls.

5. "Sleep", 1937

It depicts one of the surreal phenomena - a dream. This is a fragile, unstable reality in the world of the subconscious.

6. Appearance of a face and a bowl of fruit on the seashore, 1938

This fantastic painting is especially interesting, since the author uses double images in it, endowing the image itself with a multi-level meaning. Metamorphoses, amazing juxtapositions of objects and hidden elements characterize Dali's surrealist paintings.

7. The Persistence of Memory, 1931

This is perhaps the most recognizable surreal painting Salvador Dali, who embodies softness and hardness, symbolizes the relativity of space and time. To a large extent, it relies on Einstein's theory of relativity, although Dali said that the idea for the picture was born at the sight of Camembert cheese melted in the sun.

8. The Three Sphinxes of Bikini Island, 1947

This surreal depiction of Bikini Atoll evokes the memory of the war. Three symbolic sphinxes occupy different plans: human head, a split tree and a mushroom of a nuclear explosion, speaking of the horrors of war. The painting explores the relationship between three subjects.

9. "Galatea with spheres", 1952

The portrait of Dali's wife is presented through an array of spherical shapes. Gala is like a portrait of the Madonna. The artist, inspired by science, elevated Galatea above the tangible world to the upper etheric layers.

10. Melted Clock, 1954

Another depiction of a time-measuring object has been given an ethereal softness that is not typical of a hard pocket watch.

11. “My naked wife, contemplating her own flesh, which has turned into a staircase, into three vertebrae of a column, into the sky and into architecture”, 1945

Gala from the back. This wonderful image became one of the most eclectic works of Dali, where classics and surrealism, calmness and strangeness combined.

12. "Soft construction with boiled beans", 1936

The second name of the picture is “Premonition of the Civil War”. It depicts the alleged horrors of the Spanish Civil War, as the artist painted it six months before the conflict began. This was one of Salvador Dali's forebodings.

13. "The Birth of Liquid Desires", 1931-32

We see one example of a paranoid-critical approach to art. Images of father and possibly mother are mixed with a grotesque, unreal image of a hermaphrodite in the middle. The picture is filled with symbolism.

14. "The Riddle of Desire: My mother, my mother, my mother", 1929

This work, created on Freudian principles, became an example of Dali's relationship with his mother, whose distorted body appears in the Dalinian desert.

15. Untitled - Fresco painting design for Helena Rubinstein, 1942

The image was created for the interior decoration of the premises by order of Helena Rubinstein. This is a frankly surreal picture from the world of fantasy and dreams. The artist was inspired by classical mythology.

16. "Sodom self-satisfaction of an innocent maiden", 1954

The picture shows female figure and abstract background. The artist explores the issue of repressed sexuality, which follows from the title of the work and the phallic forms that often appear in Dali's work.

17. Geopolitical Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, 1943

The artist expressed his skepticism by painting this painting while in the United States. The shape of the ball seems to be a symbolic incubator of the "new" man, the man of the "new world".

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 is truly 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, outdated and without of great importance now an attribute.

In any case, the painting "The Persistence of Time" is one of famous works art of 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. true meaning The painting "The Persistence of Time" is no longer recognizable to us. 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.

Artist: Salvador Dali

Picture painted: 1931
Canvas, handmade tapestry
Size: 24×33 cm

Description of the painting "The Persistence of Memory" S. Dali

Artist: Salvador Dali
Name of the painting: "The Persistence of Memory"
Picture painted: 1931
Canvas, handmade tapestry
Size: 24×33 cm

Everything is said and written about Salvador Dali. For example, that he was paranoid, had no connections with real women before the Gala, and that his paintings are incomprehensible. In principle, all this is true, but every fact or fiction from his biography is directly related to the work of a genius (it’s rather problematic to call Dali an artist, and it’s not worth it).

Dali was delirious in his sleep and transferred all this to the canvas. Add to this his confused thoughts, his passion for psychoanalysis, and you get in total pictures that amaze the mind. One of them is “Memory Persistence”, which is also called “Soft Hours”, “Memory Hardness” and “Memory Persistence”.

The history of the appearance of this canvas is directly related to the biography of the artist. Until 1929, in his life there were no hobbies for women, not counting unreal drawings or those that came to Dali in a dream. And then came the Russian emigrant Elena Dyakonova, better known as Gala.

At first, she was known as the wife of the writer Paul Eluard and the mistress of the sculptor Max Ernst, both at the same time. The whole trinity lived under one roof (a direct parallel with Brik and Mayakovsky), shared the bed and sex for three, and it seemed that this situation suited both the men and Gala. Yes, this woman loved hoaxes, as well as sexual experiments, but nevertheless, surrealist artists and writers listened to her, which was very rare. Gala needed geniuses, one of which was Salvador Dali. The couple lived together for 53 years, and the artist stated that he loved her more than her mother, money and Picasso.

Like it or not, we will not know, but the following is known about the painting “Memory Space”, to which Dyakonova inspired the writer. The landscape with Port Ligat was almost painted, but something was missing. Gala went to the cinema that evening, and Salvador sat down at the easel. Within two hours, this picture was born. When the artist's muse saw the painting, she predicted that those who saw it at least once would never forget it.

At an exhibition in New York, the outrageous artist explained the idea of the painting in his own way - by the nature of melted Camembert cheese, combined with the teachings of Heraclitus on measuring time by the flow of thought.

The main part of the picture is the bright red landscape of Port Ligat, the place where he lived. The shore is deserted and explains the emptiness inner world artist. Blue water can be seen in the distance, and a dry tree is in the foreground. This, in principle, and all that is clear at first glance. The rest of the images on Dali's creation are deeply symbolic and should be considered only in this context.

Three soft clocks blue color, quietly hanging on the branches of a tree, a man and a cube are symbols of time, which flows non-linearly and arbitrarily. It fills subjective space in the same way. The number of hours means the past, present and future associated with the theory of relativity. Dali himself said that he painted a soft clock, because he did not consider the connection between time and space to be something outstanding and "it was the same as any other."

The blurry subject with eyelashes refers you to the fears of the artist himself. As you know, he took subjects for paintings in a dream, which he called the death of the objective world. According to the basics of psychoanalysis and Dali's beliefs, sleep releases what people hide deep within themselves. And therefore, the mollusk-like object is a self-portrait of Salvador Dali, who is sleeping. He compared himself to a hermit oyster and said that Gala managed to save her from the whole world.

The solid clock in the picture symbolizes the objective time that is against us, because it lies face down.

It is noteworthy that the time recorded on each clock is different - that is, each pendulum corresponds to an event that remains in human memory. However, the clock is running and changing the head, that is, memory is able to change events.

The ants in the painting are a symbol of decay associated with the childhood of the artist himself. He saw a corpse bat, teeming with these insects, and since then their presence has become the fix idea of all creativity. Ants crawl over the hard clock like hour and minute hands, so real time kills itself.

Dali called flies "Mediterranean fairies" and considered the insects that inspired Greek philosophers to write their treatises. Ancient Hellas is directly related to the olive, a symbol of the wisdom of antiquity, which no longer exists. For this reason, the olive is depicted dry.

The painting also depicts Cape Creus, which was located near hometown Dali. The surrealist himself considered him the source of his philosophy of paranoid metamorphosis. On the canvas, it has the form of a blue haze of the sky in the distance and brown rocks.

The sea, according to the artist, is an eternal symbol of infinity, an ideal plane for travel. Time there flows slowly and objectively, obeying its inner life.

In the background, near the rocks, there is an egg. This is a symbol of life, borrowed from the ancient Greek representatives of the mystical school. They interpret the World Egg as the progenitor of mankind. From it appeared the androgynous Phanes, who created people, and the halves of the shell gave them heaven and earth.

Another image in the background of the painting is a mirror lying horizontally. It is called a symbol of variability and impermanence, which combines the subjective and objective worlds.

The extravagance and irresistibility of Dali is that his true masterpieces are not paintings, but the meaning hidden in them. The artist defended the right to creative freedom, to the connection between art and philosophy, history and other sciences.

… Modern physicists are increasingly saying that time is one of the dimensions of space, that is, the world that surrounds us does not consist of three dimensions, but of four. Somewhere at the level of our subconscious, a person forms an intuitive idea of a sense of time, but it is difficult to imagine it. Salvador Dali is one of the few people who succeeded, because he was able to interpret the phenomenon that no one before him could reveal and recreate.

Plot

Dali, like a real surrealist, immerses us in the world of dreams with his painting. Fussy, chaotic, mystical and at the same time seeming understandable and real.

On the one hand, the familiar clock, the sea, the rocky landscape, the withered tree. On the other hand, their appearance and proximity to other, poorly identifiable objects leaves one perplexed.

There are three clocks in the picture: past, present and future. The artist followed the ideas of Heraclitus, who believed that time is measured by the flow of thought. A soft clock is a symbol of non-linear, subjective time, arbitrarily flowing and unevenly filling space.

Dali's molten watch was invented while thinking about Camembert

A hard clock infested with ants is linear time that devours itself. The image of insects as a symbol of decay and decay haunted Dali since childhood, when he saw how insects swarm on the carcass of a bat.

But Dali called the flies the fairies of the Mediterranean: "They carried inspiration to the Greek philosophers who spent their lives under the sun, covered in flies."

The artist depicted himself sleeping in the form of a blurry object with eyelashes. “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.”

Salvador Dali

The tree is depicted dry, because, as Dali believed, ancient wisdom (of which this tree is a symbol) has sunk into oblivion.

The deserted shore is the cry of the soul of the artist, who through this image speaks of his emptiness, loneliness and longing. “Here (at Cape Creus in Catalonia - ed.), - he wrote, - the most important principle of my theory of paranoid metamorphoses is embodied in rock granite ... These are frozen clouds reared by an explosion in all their countless guises, more and more - there is only slightly change the angle of view.

At the same time, the sea is a symbol of immortality and eternity. According to Dali, the sea is ideal for traveling, where time flows in accordance with the internal rhythms of consciousness.

Dali took the image of an egg as a symbol of life from the ancient mystics. The latter believed that the first bisexual deity Phanes was born from the World Egg, which created people, and heaven and earth were formed from the two halves of its shell.

A mirror lies horizontally on the left. It reflects everything you want: both the real world and dreams. For Dali, the mirror is a symbol of impermanence.

Context

According to a legend invented by Dali himself, he created the image of a flowing clock in just two hours: “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” processed 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.

Gala: no one will be able to forget these soft clocks after seeing them at least once

After 20 years, the picture was built into a new concept - "Disintegration of Memory Persistence". The iconic image is surrounded by nuclear mysticism. Soft dials quietly disintegrate, the world is divided into clear blocks, the space is under water. The 1950s, with post-war reflection and technical progress, obviously plowed Dali.

"The Disintegration of Memory Persistence"

Dali is buried in such a way that anyone can walk on his grave

Creating all this diversity, Dali also invented himself - from mustaches to hysterical behavior. He saw how many talented people who were not noticed. Therefore, the artist regularly reminded himself of himself in the most eccentric possible manner.

Dali on the roof of his house in Spain

Even Dali's death was turned into a performance: according to his will, he was to be buried so that people could walk on the grave. Which was done after his death in 1989. Today, Dali's body is buried in the floor in one of the rooms of his house in Figueres.

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