The picture of time running out in the form of a melting clock. “The Persistence of Memory”, Salvador Dali: description of the painting. Brief biographical information

The Persistence of the Memory of Salvador Dali, or, as is popularly known, the soft watch, is perhaps the master’s most popular painting. The only people who haven’t heard about it are those who are in an information vacuum in some village without a sewer system.

Well, let’s start our “story of one painting,” perhaps, with its description, so beloved by hippopotamus adherents. For those who don’t understand what I mean, conversations about hippopotamus are a blast, especially for those who have at least once communicated with an art critic. It's on YouTube, Google can help. But let's return to our Salvadoran sheep.

The same painting “The Persistence of Memory”, another name is “Soft Hours”. The genre of the picture is surrealism, your captain of obviousness is always ready to serve. Located in the New York Museum contemporary art. Oil. Year of creation: 1931. Size: 100 by 330 cm.

More about Salvadorich and his paintings

The permanence of Salvador Dali's memory, description of the painting.

The painting depicts the lifeless landscape of the notorious Port Lligat, where Salvador spent a significant part of his life. On foreground in the left corner there is a piece of something hard, on which, in fact, there is a pair of soft watches. One of the soft watches is dripping from a hard thing (either a rock, or hardened earth, or God knows what), another watch is located on the branch of the corpse of an olive tree that has long since died in the bosom. That red weird thing in the left corner is a solid pocket watch being eaten by ants.

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

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

Salvador Dali Constancy of memory, analysis of paintings and the meaning of images.

My personal opinion is that the painting symbolizes exactly what is stated in its title - the constancy of memory, while time is fleeting and quickly “melts” and “flows down” like a soft clock 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 Dali’s words and therefore closest to the truth. Although the master was still a talker and a hoaxer, and his words should be filtered through a fine, fine sieve.

Deep Meaning Syndrome

This is all below - the creation of shadowy geniuses from the Internet and I don’t know how to feel about it. I have not found any documentary evidence or statements from 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 some degree of authenticity, since Dali was familiar firsthand with the philosophy of the ancient thinker. Salvadorich even has a decoration (a necklace, if I'm not mistaken) called the Heraclitus fountain.

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

The hard clock is perhaps time in the physical sense, and the soft clock is the subjective time we perceive. More like the truth.

The dead olive is supposedly a symbol of ancient wisdom that has sunk into oblivion. This is, of course, interesting, but considering that at the beginning Dali simply painted a landscape, and the idea to include 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, since, 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 painting The Persistence of Memory was created under the influence of ideas about the theory of relativity of Uncle Albert. In response to this, Dali replied in an interview that, in fact, he was inspired not 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 good yum with a delicate texture and a slightly mushroom flavor. Although Dorblu is much tastier, in my opinion.

What does the sleeping Dali himself mean in the middle, wrapped in a clock? 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? Covered in the darkness of history.

Painting is the art of expressing the invisible through the visible.

Eugene Fromentin.

Painting, and in particular its “podcast” surrealism, is not a genre understood by everyone. Those who do not understand throw loud words of criticism, and those who understand are ready to give millions for paintings of this genre. Here is the painting by the first and most famous of the surrealists, “Flying Time”, which has “two camps” of opinions. Some shout that the picture is unworthy of all the fame it has, while others are ready to look at the picture for hours and receive aesthetic pleasure...

The surrealist painting carries a very deep meaning. And this meaning develops into a problem - time flowing away aimlessly.

In the 20th century, in which Dali lived, this problem already existed and was already eating up people. Many did absolutely nothing useful for them and for society. They wasted their lives. And in the 21st century it gains even greater strength and tragedy. Teenagers do not read, they sit in front of computers and various gadgets aimlessly and without benefit to themselves. On the contrary: to your own detriment. And even if Dali did not imagine the significance of his painting in the 21st century, it created a sensation and this is a fact.

Nowadays, “flowing time” has become the object of controversy and conflict. Many deny all significance, deny the meaning itself and deny surrealism as art itself. They argue whether Dali was aware of the problems of the 21st century when he painted the picture in the 20th?

But nevertheless, “flowing time” is considered one of the most expensive and famous paintings by the artist Salvador Dali.

It seems to me that in the 20th century there were problems that weighed heavily on the shoulders of the painter. And opening new genre painting, he, with a cry displayed on canvas, tried to convey to people: “don’t waste precious time!” And his call was accepted not as an instructive “story”, but as a masterpiece of the surrealism genre. The meaning is lost in the money that swirls around the passing time. And this circle is closed. The picture, which, according to the author’s assumption, was supposed to teach people not to waste time, became a paradox: it itself began to waste people’s time and money. Why does a person need a painting in his house, hanging aimlessly? Why spend a lot of money on it? I don’t think that Salvador painted a masterpiece for the sake of money, because when money is the goal, nothing comes of it.

“Flying Time” has been teaching for several generations not to miss, not to waste precious seconds of life. Many value precisely the painting, precisely the prestige: they were given an interest in the surrealism of El Salvador, but they do not notice the scream and meaning put into the canvas.

And now, when it is so important to show people that time is more valuable than diamonds, the picture is more relevant and instructive than ever. But only money revolves around her. This is unfortunate.

In my opinion, schools should have art classes. Not just drawing, but painting and the meaning of painting. Show to children famous paintings famous artists and reveal to them the meaning of their creations. For the work of artists who paint in the same way as poets and writers write their works should not become the goal of prestige and money. I think that’s not why SUCH pictures are drawn. Minimalism is, yes, stupidity, for which they pay a lot of money. And surrealism in some exhibits. But such paintings as “flowing time”, “Malevich’s square”, etc. should not gather dust on someone’s walls, but be the center of everyone’s attention and reflection in museums. You can argue about Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square for days about what he meant, and in Salvador Dali’s painting he finds new understandings from year to year. This is what painting and art in general are for. IMHO, as the Japanese would say.

Dali suffered from paranoid syndrome, but without it there would not have been Dali as an artist. Dali experienced bouts of mild delirium, which he could transfer to canvas. The thoughts that Dali had while creating his paintings were always bizarre. The history of one of his most famous works, “The Persistence of Memory,” is bright that example.

(1)Soft watch- a symbol of nonlinear, subjective time, flowing arbitrarily and unevenly filling space. The three clocks in the picture are the past, present and future. “You asked me,” Dali wrote to physicist Ilya Prigogine, “if I thought about Einstein when I drew a soft clock (referring to 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 about Heraclitus (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 between space and time."

(2) Blurry object with eyelashes. This is a self-portrait of Dali sleeping. 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. “A dream is death, or at least it is an exception 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’s oyster pulp in a fortress-shell, and thereby saved it.”

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

(4) Ants- a symbol of rotting and decomposition. According to the professor Russian Academy painting, sculpture and architecture by Nina Getashvili, “a child’s impression of an ant-infested bat the wounded animal, as well as the memory invented by the artist himself of a bathed baby with ants in the anus, endowed the artist with the obsessive presence of this insect in his painting for the rest of his life.

On the clock on the left, the only one that has remained solid, 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 decomposition.” According to Dali, linear time eats itself.

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

(6) Olive.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 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 rocky granite.” These are frozen clouds, reared up by an explosion, in all their countless guises, more and more new - you just have to change your perspective a little.”

(8) Seafor Dali it symbolized immortality and eternity. The artist considered it an ideal space for travel, where time flows not 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 bisexual deity Phanes, who created people, was born from the World Egg, and heaven and earth were formed from the two halves of his shell.

(10) Mirror, lying horizontally on the left. This is a symbol of changeability and impermanence, obediently reflecting both the subjective and objective world.

In 1931 he painted a picture "The Constancy of Time" , which is often abbreviated to simply "Clock". The painting has an unusual, strange, outlandish plot, like all the works of this artist, and is truly a masterpiece of the work of Salvador Dali. What meaning did the artist put into “The Constancy of Time” and what could all these melting clocks depicted in the picture mean?

The meaning of the painting “The Constancy of Time” by surrealist artist Salvador Dali is not easy to understand. The painting depicts four clocks positioned prominently against a desert landscape. Although it is a little strange, watches do not have the usual shapes that we are used to seeing them. Here they are not flat, but bend to the shape of the objects on which they lie. An association arises as if they are melting. It becomes clear that this is a painting 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 there clocks in the desert” and “where are all the people”?

Paintings of the surreal genre, presenting themselves to the viewer in their best artistic presentation, have as their goal to convey to him the dreams of the artist. Taking a look at any picture of this genre, it may seem that its author is a schizophrenic who has combined in it the incompatible, where places, people, objects, landscapes intertwine with each other in combinations and combinations that defy logic. When pondering the meaning of the painting “The Constancy of Time,” the first thing that comes to mind is that Dali captured his dream on it.

If “The Constancy of Time” depicts a dream, then the melting clock, which has lost its shape, denotes 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 attribute 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 dreams, then distorted clocks have no power in the world of dreams, which is why they melt.

In the painting “The Constancy of Time,” the author wants to say how useless, meaningless and arbitrary our perception of time is in a state of sleep. While we are awake, we are constantly worried, nervous, in a hurry and fussing, trying to do as many things as possible. Many art historians argue about what kind of clock it is: wall or pocket, which were a very fashionable accessory in the 20s and 30s, the era of surrealism, the peak of their creativity. The surrealists ridiculed many things, objects belonging to the middle class, whose representatives attached too much importance to them and took them too seriously. In our case, this is a clock - a thing that simply shows what time it is.

Many art historians believe that Dali painted this painting on the topic 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 unchangeable quantity. With this melting clock, Dali shows us that clocks, both wall and pocket, have become primitive, obsolete and lacking of great importance now an attribute.

In any case, the painting “The Constancy of Time” is one of famous works the art of Salvador Dali, who, in truth, became an icon of surrealism of the twentieth century. We guess, interpret, analyze, imagine what meaning the author himself could have put into this picture? Each simple viewer or professional art critic has his own perception of this painting. There are so many assumptions. True meaning The painting “The Constancy 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 "The Constancy of Time" is a combination of these.

S. Dali. The constancy 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 painting depicts a clock as a symbol of the human experience of time and memory. Here they are shown in great distortions, as 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 deserted shore, with this he expressed the emptiness within himself.

This emptiness was filled when he saw a piece of Camember cheese. "... Having decided to write the hours, I painted 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 a lot delicious cheese, then I was left alone, sitting with my elbows on the table, thinking about how “super soft” processed cheese is.

I got up and went into the workshop to take a look at my work as usual. The picture that I was going to paint represented the landscape of the outskirts of Port Lligat, the rocks, as if illuminated by 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 wonderful image, but I couldn’t find it.
I went to turn off the light, and when I came out, I literally “saw” the solution: two pairs of soft watches, one hanging pitifully from an olive branch. Despite the migraine, I prepared my palette and got to work.

Two hours later, when Gala returned from the cinema, the film, which was to become one of the most famous, was finished.

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

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

HIDDEN SYMBOLS

Soft clock on the table

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

Blurry object with eyelashes.

This is a self-portrait of Dali sleeping. 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. “A dream is death, or at least it is an exception 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 mollusk - this is evidence of his defenselessness.

A solid watch lies on the left with the dial facing down. Symbol of objective time.

Ants are a symbol of rotting and decomposition. According to Nina Getashvili, a professor at the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, “a child’s 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 brought inspiration to the Greek philosophers who spent their lives under the sun, covered with flies.”

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

Cape Creus.
This cape is 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. - Ed.) is embodied in rocky granite... These are frozen clouds, reared by an explosion in all their countless guises, ever new and new ones - you just need to change your point of view a little.”

For Dali, the sea symbolized immortality and eternity. The artist considered it an ideal space for travel, where time flows not 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 bisexual deity Phanes, who created people, was born from the World Egg, and heaven and earth were formed from the two halves of his shell.

Mirror lying horizontally on the left. This is a symbol of changeability and impermanence, obediently reflecting both the subjective and objective world.

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Reviews

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

I have an ambiguous attitude towards creativity. At one time I visited his homeland in the city of Figueres in Spain. There is a large museum there that he created himself, with many of his works. It made an impression on me. Later I read his biography, reviewed his works and wrote several articles about his work.
This kind of painting is not to my liking, but it is interesting. So I simply perceive his work as a special phenomenon in painting.

We must assume that he, like any artist, has various works: those that are flagship and just ordinary. If by the first we judge the pinnacle of mastery, then the others are essentially routine work and you can’t do without it. There are probably a dozen works by Dali that can be included in the top ten best works in the world in the section of surrealism. For many, he is an example and inspiration in this direction.

What amazes me in his works is not his skill, but his imagination. Some of the paintings are simply repulsive, but it’s interesting to understand what he wanted to say. In the museum there is one composition with lips, 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.