The most famous and most discussed painting by S. Dali is "The Persistence of Memory." Brief biographical note

Salvador Dali. The Persistence of Memory. 1931 24x33 cm Museum contemporary art, New York (MOMA)

A melting clock is a very recognizable image of Dali. Even more recognizable than an egg or a nose with lips.

Remembering Dali, we willy-nilly think about the painting "The Persistence of Memory".

What is the secret of such a success of the picture? Why did she become calling card artist?

Let's try to figure it out. And at the same time, we will carefully consider all the details.

"Permanence of memory" - something to think about

Salvador Dali's many works are unique. Due to the unusual combination of details. It encourages the viewer to ask questions. Why is it all? What did the artist want to say?

The Persistence of Memory is no exception. She immediately provokes a person to think. Because the image of the current watch is very catchy.

But not only the clock makes you think. The whole picture is saturated with many contradictions.

Let's start with color. There are many in the picture brown shades. They are hot, which enhances the feeling of emptiness.

But this hot space is diluted with cold blue. Such are watch dials, the sea and the surface of a huge mirror.

Salvador Dali. Persistence of memory (detail with a dry tree). 1931 Museum of Modern Art, New York

The curvature of the dials and the branches of dry wood are in stark contrast to the straight lines of the table and the mirror.

We also see the opposition of real and unreal things. A dry tree is real, but the clock melting on it is not. The sea is real. But a mirror the size of it is unlikely to be found in our world.

Such a mixture of everything and everything leads to different thoughts. Think about the change in the world. And about the fact that time does not come, but goes. And about the neighborhood of reality and sleep in our lives.

Everyone will think, even if they do not know anything about Dali's work.

Dali's interpretation

Dali himself commented little on his masterpiece. He only said that the image of a melting watch was inspired by cheese spreading in the sun. And when painting a picture, he thought about the teachings of Heraclitus.

This ancient thinker said that everything in the world is changeable and has a dual nature. Well, there is more than enough duality in The Persistence of Time.

But why exactly did the artist name his painting? Maybe because he believed in the permanence of memory. In that, only the memory of some events and people can be preserved, despite the passage of time.

But we don't know the exact answer. This is the beauty of this masterpiece. You can struggle over the riddles of the picture for as long as you like, but you won’t find all the answers.

On that day in July 1931, Dali had a interesting image melting clock. But all other images have already been used by him in other works. They migrated to The Persistence of Memory.

Maybe that's why the film is so successful. Because this is a piggy bank of the most successful images of the artist.

Dali even drew his favorite egg. Although somewhere in the background.

Salvador Dali. Persistence of memory (fragment). 1931 Museum of Modern Art, New York

Of course, on the "Geopolitical Child" it is a close-up. But both there and there, the egg carries the same symbolism - change, the birth of something new. Again, according to Heraclitus.

Salvador Dali. geopolitical child. 1943 Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA

In the same fragment of The Persistence of Memory, a close-up shows the mountains. This is Cape Creus near his hometown of Figueres. Dali liked to transfer memories from his childhood to his paintings. So this landscape, familiar to him from birth, roams from picture to picture.

Dali self-portrait

Of course, it still catches the eye strange creature. It is, like a clock, fluid and formless. This is Dali's self-portrait.

We see a closed eye with huge eyelashes. Protruding long and thick tongue. He is clearly unconscious or not feeling well. Still, in such heat, when even the metal melts.

Salvador Dali. Persistence of memory (detail with self-portrait). 1931 Museum of Modern Art, New York

Is this a metaphor for wasted time? Or a human shell that lived its life meaninglessly?

Personally, I associate this head with Michelangelo's self-portrait from the Last Judgment fresco. The master portrayed himself in a peculiar way. In the form of loose skin.

To take a similar image is quite in the spirit of Dali. After all, his work was distinguished by frankness, a desire to show all his fears and desires. The image of a man with flayed skin suited him perfectly.

Michelangelo. Terrible Judgment. Fragment. 1537-1541 Sistine Chapel, Vatican

In general, such a self-portrait is a frequent occurrence in Dali's paintings. Close-up we see him on the canvas "The Great Masturbator".

Salvador Dali. Great masturbator. 1929 Reina Sofia Art Center, Madrid

And now we can already draw a conclusion about another secret to the success of the picture. All the pictures given for comparison have one feature. Like many other works of Dali.

juicy details

There is a lot of sexual overtones in Dali's works. You can't just show them to an audience under 16. And you can't depict them on posters either. Otherwise, they will be accused of insulting the feelings of passers-by. How did it happen with reproductions.

But "The Persistence of Memory" is quite innocent. Replicate as much as you want. And in schools, show them in art classes. And print on mugs with T-shirts.

It's hard not to pay attention to insects. A fly sits on one dial. On the inverted red clock - ants.

Salvador Dali. Persistence of memory (detail). 1931 Museum of Modern Art, New York

Ants are also frequent guests in the master's paintings. We see them on the same "Masturbator". They swarm on locusts and around the mouth.

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. In the distance you can see blue water, and on foreground- dry wood. 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 watch 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 humanity. 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 before him could not be revealed and recreated by anyone.

The secret meaning of the painting "The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali

Dali suffered from paranoia, but without him Dali would not exist as an artist. Dali had bouts of mild delirium, which he could transfer to the canvas. The thoughts that visited Dali during the creation of paintings have always been bizarre. The history of the emergence of one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory, is a vivid example of this.

(1) Soft watch- a symbol of non-linear, subjective time, arbitrarily flowing and unevenly filling space. The three clocks in the picture are past, present and future. “You asked me,” Dali wrote to physicist Ilya Prigogine, “whether I was thinking about Einstein when I was drawing soft clocks (meaning the theory of relativity). I answer you in the negative, the fact is that the connection between space and time was absolutely obvious to me for a long time, so there was nothing special in this picture for me, it was the same as any other ... To this I can add that I thought of Heraclitus (an ancient Greek philosopher who believed that time is measured by the flow of thought). That is why my painting is called The Persistence of Memory. Memory of the relationship of space and time.

(2) Blurred object with eyelashes. This is a self-portrait of a sleeping Dali. The world in the picture is his dream, the death of the objective world, the triumph of the unconscious. “The relationship between sleep, love and death is obvious,” the artist wrote in his autobiography. “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.” According to Dali, sleep frees the subconscious, so the artist's head blurs like a clam - this is evidence of his defenselessness. Only Gala, he will say after the death of his wife, “knowing my defenselessness, hid my hermit oyster pulp in a fortress-shell, and thus saved it.”

(3) Solid watchlie on the left with the dial down - this is a symbol of objective time.

(4) Ants- a symbol of decay and decay. According to professor Russian Academy painting, sculpture and architecture by Nina Getashvili, baby impression from an ant-infested wounded mouse, as well as the artist’s own memory of a bathing baby with ants in the anus for life endowed the artist with the obsessive presence of this insect in his painting.

On the clock on the left, the only one that has retained its hardness, the ants also create a clear cyclic structure, obeying the divisions of the chronometer. However, this does not obscure the meaning that the presence of ants is still a sign of decay.” According to Dali, linear time devours itself.

(5) Fly.According to Nina Getashvili, “the artist called them fairies of the Mediterranean. In The Diary of a Genius, Dali wrote: "They carried inspiration to the Greek philosophers who spent their lives under the sun, covered in flies."

(6) Oliva.For the artist, this is a symbol of ancient wisdom, which, unfortunately, has already sunk into oblivion and therefore the tree is depicted dry.

(7) Cape Creus.This cape on the Catalan coast of the Mediterranean Sea, near the city of Figueres, where Dali was born. The artist often depicted him in paintings. “Here,” he wrote, “the most important principle of my theory of paranoid metamorphoses (the flow of one delusional image into another) is embodied in rock granite. These are frozen clouds reared up by an explosion in all their countless incarnations, all new and new - you just need to slightly change the angle of view.

(8) Seafor Dali it symbolized immortality and eternity. The artist considered it an ideal space for traveling, where time does not flow at an objective speed, but in accordance with the internal rhythms of the traveler's consciousness.

(9) Egg.According to Nina Getashvili, the World Egg in Dali's work symbolizes life. The artist borrowed his image from the Orphics - ancient Greek mystics. According to Orphic mythology, the first androgynous deity Phanes was born from the World Egg, who created people, and heaven and earth were formed from the two halves of its shell.

(10) Mirrorlying horizontally to the left. It is a symbol of variability and inconstancy, obediently reflecting both the subjective and objective world.

The constancy of the memory of Salvador Dali, or, as is customary among the people, soft watches - this is perhaps the most poppy picture of the master. Only those who are in an information vacuum in some village without sewerage have not heard about it.

Well, let's start our "history of one picture", perhaps, with its description, so beloved by the adherents of hippo painting. For those who don’t understand what I mean, talking about hippo painting is a carbon monoxide video, especially for those who have ever talked with an art historian. There is on YouTube, Google to help. But back to our sheep Salvadors.

The same painting "The Persistence of Memory", another name is "Soft Clock". The genre of the picture is surrealism, your captain is obviously always ready to serve. Located in the New York Museum of Modern Art. Oil. Year of creation 1931. Size - 100 by 330 cm.

More about Salvadorych and his paintings

The constancy of the memory of Salvador Dali, a description of the painting.

The painting depicts the lifeless landscape of the notorious Port Lligat, where Salvador spent a significant part of his life. In the foreground, in the left corner, there is a piece of something solid, on which, in fact, a couple of soft clocks are located. One of the soft clocks is flowing down from a solid thing (either a rock, or hardened earth, or the devil knows what), the other clocks are located on a branch of a corpse of an olive that has long since died in the Bose. That red incomprehensible bullshit in the left corner is a solid pocket watch being devoured by ants.

In the middle of the composition, one can see an amorphous mass with eyelashes, in which, nevertheless, one can easily see a self-portrait of Salvador Dali. Similar image is present in so many paintings by Salvadorych that it is quite difficult not to recognize him (for example, in) Soft Dali wrapped soft hours like a blanket and, apparently, sleeps and sees sweet dreams.

In the background, the sea settled, coastal cliffs and again a piece of some hard blue unknown garbage.

Salvador Dali Persistence of memory, analysis of the picture and the meaning of images.

Personally, my opinion is that the picture symbolizes exactly what is stated in its title - the constancy of memory, while time is fleeting and quickly “melts” and “flows” like a soft watch or is devoured like a hard one. As they say, sometimes a banana is just a banana.

All that can be said with some degree of certainty is that Salvador painted the picture while Gala went to the cinema to have fun, and he stayed at home due to a migraine attack. The idea for the painting came to him some time after eating soft Camembert cheese and thinking about its "super softness". All this is from the words of Dali and therefore is closest to the truth. Although the master was still that balabol and mystifier, and his words should be filtered through a fine-fine sieve.

Deep Meaning Syndrome

This is all below - the creation of gloomy geniuses from the Internet and I don’t know how to relate to this. I did not find documentary evidence and statements by El Salvador on this matter, so do not take it at face value. But some assumptions are beautiful and have a place to be.

When creating the painting, Salvador may have been inspired by the common ancient saying “Everything flows, everything changes,” which is attributed to Heraclitus. Claims to a certain degree of reliability, since Dali was familiar with the philosophy of the ancient thinker firsthand. Salvadorych even has a piece of jewelry (a necklace, if I'm not mistaken) called Heraclitus' Fountain.

There is an opinion that the three clocks in the picture are the past, present and future. It is unlikely that Salvador really intended it that way, but the idea is beautiful.

Hard clocks, perhaps, are time in the physical sense, and soft clocks are subjective time that we perceive. More like the truth.

The dead olive is supposedly a symbol of ancient wisdom that has sunk into oblivion. This, of course, is interesting, but given that at the beginning Dali simply painted a landscape, and the idea to inscribe all these surreal images came to him much later, it seems very doubtful.

The sea in the picture is supposedly a symbol of immortality and eternity. It’s also beautiful, but I doubt it, because, again, the landscape was painted earlier and did not contain any deep and surreal ideas.

Among lovers of the search for deep meaning, there was an assumption that the picture of the Persistence of Memory was created under the influence of Uncle Albert's ideas about the theory of relativity. In response to this, Dali replied in his interview that, in fact, he was not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by "the surreal feeling of Camembert cheese melting in the sun." So it goes.

By the way, Camembert is a very suitable nyamka with a delicate texture and a slightly mushroom flavor. Although Dorblu is much tastier, as for me.

What does the sleeping Dali himself in the middle, wrapped in a watch, mean - I have no idea, to be honest. Did you want to show your unity with time, with memory? Or the connection of time with sleep and death? Shrouded in the darkness of history.

S. Dali. Persistence of memory, 1931.

The most famous and most discussed painting by Salvador Dali among artists. The painting is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1934.

This picture depicts a clock as a symbol of the human experience of time, memory. Here they are shown in large distortions, which our memories sometimes are. Dali did not forget himself, he is also present in the form of a sleeping head, which appears in his other paintings. During this period, Dali constantly displayed the image of a deserted coast, by which he expressed the emptiness within himself.

This void was filled when he saw a piece of Kemember cheese. "... Deciding to write a clock, I wrote them soft. It was one evening, I was tired, I had a migraine - an extremely rare ailment for me. 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" melted 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.

The painting has become a symbol of the modern concept of the relativity of time. A year after the exhibition in the Paris gallery of Pierre Colet, the painting was bought by the New York Museum of Modern Art.

In the picture, the artist expressed the relativity of time and emphasized the amazing property of human memory, which allows us to be transported again to those days that have long been left in the past.

HIDDEN SYMBOLS

Soft clock on the table

A symbol of non-linear, subjective time, arbitrarily flowing and unevenly filling space. The three clocks in the picture are past, present and future.

Blurred object with eyelashes.

This is a self-portrait of a sleeping Dali. The world in the picture is his dream, the death of the objective world, the triumph of the unconscious. “The relationship between sleep, love and death is obvious,” the artist wrote in his autobiography. “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.” According to Dali, sleep frees the subconscious, so the artist's head blurs like a clam - this is evidence of his defenselessness.

Solid clock, lie on the left side of the dial down. Symbol of objective time.

Ants are a symbol of decay and decay. According to Nina Getashvili, a professor at the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, “a childish impression of a wounded bat infested with ants.
Fly. According to Nina Getashvili, “the artist called them fairies of the Mediterranean. In The Diary of a Genius, Dali wrote: "They carried inspiration to the Greek philosophers who spent their lives under the sun, covered in flies."

Olive.
For the artist, this is a symbol of ancient wisdom, which, unfortunately, has already sunk into oblivion (therefore, the tree is depicted dry).

Cape Creus.
This cape on the Catalan coast of the Mediterranean Sea, near the city of Figueres, where Dali was born. The artist often depicted him in paintings. “Here,” he wrote, “the most important principle of my theory of paranoid metamorphoses (the flow of one delusional image into another. - Approx. ed.) is embodied in rock granite ... new ones - you just need to slightly change the angle of view.

The sea for Dali symbolized immortality and eternity. The artist considered it an ideal space for traveling, where time does not flow at an objective speed, but in accordance with the internal rhythms of the traveler's consciousness.

Egg.
According to Nina Getashvili, the World Egg in Dali's work symbolizes life. The artist borrowed his image from the Orphics - ancient Greek mystics. According to Orphic mythology, the first androgynous deity Phanes was born from the World Egg, who created people, and heaven and earth were formed from the two halves of its shell.

Mirror lying horizontally to the left. It is a symbol of variability and inconstancy, obediently reflecting both the subjective and objective world.

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Reviews

One has to regret that Salvador Dali did not paint, but only painted objects to look like a photograph, although he gives this explanation why he did just that in his "Diary of a Genius", but this work it can hardly be attributed to successful, it costs exactly as much as the mental effort spent on it. A large dark, simply painted over field creates an undesirable effect of being unoccupied, and even a lying head does not give impetus to comprehend the essence of the idea. Using dreams in his work, as he did, is a good thing, but does not always lead to brilliant results.

My attitude towards creativity was ambiguous. At one time I visited his homeland in the city of Figueres in Spain. There is a large museum there, which he himself created, many of his works. This made an impression on me. Later, I read his biography, reviewed his works and wrote several articles about his work.
I don’t like this kind of painting, but it’s interesting. So I just perceive his work as a special phenomenon in painting.

It must be assumed that he, like any artist, has various works: those that are flagship and just ordinary. If by the first we judge the pinnacle of skill, then the others are essentially routine work and you can’t do without it. Perhaps a dozen of Dali's works are exactly those with which you can enter the top ten most-most in the world in the section of surrealism. To many, he is an example and inspirer of this direction.

What amazes me in his work is not skill, but fantasy. Some of the paintings are simply repulsive, but it’s interesting to figure out what he wanted to say. There is one composition with lips in the museum, something similar to theatrical scenery. You can also look at the museum at this link and some work. By the way, he is buried in this museum.