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 contemporary art. Butter. 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. On the foreground in the left corner there is a piece of something solid, on which, in fact, a pair of soft watches is located. One of the soft clocks is flowing down from a hard 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 surrealistic 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.

Salvador Dali - Persistence of memory (Spanish: La persistencia de la memoria).

Year of creation: 1931

Canvas, handmade tapestry.

Original size: 24×33cm

Museum of Modern Art, New York

« The Persistence of Memory"(Spanish: La persistencia de la memoria, 1931) - one of the most famous paintings artist Salvador Dali. It has been in the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1934.

Also known as " soft watch», « Hardness of memory" or " Memory Persistence».

This small picture(24×33 cm) - probably the most notable work Dali. The softness of the hanging and flowing clock is an image that could be described as: "it spreads into the realm of the unconscious, enlivening the universal human experience of time and memory." Dali himself is present here in the form of a sleeping head, which has already appeared in The Funeral Game and other paintings. In accordance with his method, the artist explained the origin of the plot by thinking about the nature of Camembert cheese; the landscape with Port Ligat was already ready, so it was a matter of two hours to paint the picture. Returning from the cinema, where she went that evening, Gala quite correctly predicted that no one, having seen The Persistence of Memory once, would forget it. The picture was painted as a result of the associations that arose in Dali at the sight of processed cheese, as evidenced by his own quote.

Description of the painting by Salvador Dali “The Persistence of Memory”

The greatest representative of surrealism in painting, Salvador Dali, truly skillfully combined mystery and evidence. This amazing Spanish artist performed his paintings in a manner inherent only to him, sharpened life questions with the help of an original and opposite combination of the real and the fantastic.

One of famous paintings, known by several names, the most common being "Memory Persistence", but also known as "Soft Watch", "Memory Hardness" or "Memory Persistence".

This is a very small picture of time arbitrarily flowing and unevenly filling space. The artist himself explained that the emergence of this plot is associated with associations when thinking about the nature of processed cheese.

It all starts with a landscape, it takes up little space on the canvas. In the distance one can see the desert and the sea coast, perhaps this is a reflection of the inner emptiness of the artist. There are still three clocks in the picture, but they are flowing. This is a temporary space through which the flow of life flows, but it can change.

Most of the artist's paintings, their ideas, content, subtext, became known from the notes in the diaries of Salvador Dali. But what is the opinion of the artist himself about this picture is not found, not a single line. There are many opinions about what the artist wanted to convey to us. There are some so contradictory that this saggy watch speaks of Dali's fears, perhaps in front of any male problems. But, despite all these assumptions, the picture is very popular, thanks to the originality of the surrealist direction.

Most often, the word surrealism refers to Dali, and his painting “The Persistence of Memory” comes to mind. Now this work is in New York, you can see it at the Museum of Modern Art.

The idea for the work came to Dali on a hot summer day. He lay at home with a headache, and Gala went shopping. After eating, Dali noticed that the cheese melted from the heat, became fluid. It somehow coincided with what Dali had in his soul. The artist had a desire to paint a landscape with a melting clock. He returned to the unfinished painting he was working on at the time, which showed a tree on a platform with mountains in the background. Within two or three hours Salvador Dali hung a melted pocket watch on the painting, which made the painting what it is today.

Salvador Dali
The Persistence of Memory 1931

History of creation

It was the summer of 1931 in Paris, when Dali was preparing for a solo exhibition. After spending Gala with friends at the cinema, “I,” writes Dali in his memoirs, “returned to the table (we finished dinner with an excellent Camembert) and plunged into thoughts about the spreading pulp. Cheese popped into my mind's eye. I got up and, as usual, went to the studio to look at the picture I was painting before going to bed. It was the landscape of Port Lligat in the transparent, sad sunset light. In the foreground is the bare skeleton of an olive tree with a broken branch.

I felt that in this picture I managed to create an atmosphere consonant with some important image - but what? I have not the foggiest idea. 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, they hang plaintively from an olive branch. Despite the migraine, I prepared my palette and set to work. Two hours later, by the time Gala returned, the most famous of my paintings was finished.

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, there were no hobbies in his life for women, not counting unrealistic 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. seen in the distance blue water, and in the foreground - a dry tree. 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 blue clocks, 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, on 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.

Surrealism is the complete freedom of a human being and the right to dream. I am not a surrealist, I am surrealism, - S. Dali.

Formation artistic skill Dali took place in the era of early modernity, when his contemporaries in to a large extent presented such new artistic currents like Expressionism and Cubism.

In 1929, the young artist joined the Surrealists. This year marked an important turn in his life as Salvador Dali met Gala. She became his mistress, wife, muse, model and main inspiration.

Since he was a brilliant draftsman and colorist, Dali drew much inspiration from the old masters. But he used extravagant forms and inventive ways to compose an entirely new, modern and innovative style of art. His paintings are distinguished by the use of double images, ironic scenes, optical illusions, dream landscapes and deep symbolism.

Throughout its creative life Dali was never limited to one direction. He worked with oil paints and watercolor, created drawings and sculptures, films and photographs. Even the variety of forms of execution was not alien to the artist, including the creation of jewelry and other works. applied arts. As a screenwriter, Dali collaborated with the famous director Luis Buñuel, who made the films The Golden Age and The Andalusian Dog. They displayed unrealistic scenes, reminiscent of the revived paintings of a surrealist.

The prolific and extremely gifted master left a huge legacy for future generations of artists and art lovers. Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation launched an online project Catalog Raisonné of Salvador Dali for a complete scientific cataloging of the paintings created by Salvador Dali between 1910 and 1983. The catalog consists of five sections divided according to the timeline. It was conceived not only to provide comprehensive information about the artist's work, but also to determine the authorship of works, since Salvador Dali is one of the most forged painters.

These 17 examples of his surrealistic paintings testify to the fantastic talent, imagination and skill of the eccentric Salvador Dali.

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

This small picture with a rather 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 picture is apolitical, it, like many others, displays deep and anxious feelings anxiety 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 the method psychological analysis Freud.

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 planes: human head, split tree and mushroom nuclear explosion talking about 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 early August 1929, young Dali met his future wife and muse Gala. Their union became the key to the incredible success of the artist, influencing all his subsequent work, including the painting "The Persistence of Memory".

(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. - Approx. ed.). 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 I thought about Heraclitus (an ancient Greek philosopher who believed that time is measured by the flow of thought. - Approx. ed.). 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 watch - lie on the left with the dial down - a symbol of objective time.

(4) Ants- a symbol of decay and decay. According to Nina Getashvili, professor Russian Academy painting, sculpture and architecture, “the childhood impression of a wounded bat swarming with ants, 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. (“I loved to nostalgically recall this action, which in fact did not take place,” the artist writes in “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, told by himself.” - Approx. ed.). 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) Olive. For the artist, this is a symbol of ancient wisdom, which, unfortunately, has already sunk into oblivion (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. - Approx. ed.) is embodied in rock granite ... new ones - you just need to slightly change the angle of view.

(8) Sea for 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) Mirror lying horizontally to the left. It is a symbol of variability and impermanence, obediently reflecting both the subjective and the objective world.

Photo: M.FLYNN/ALAMY/DIOMEDIA, CARL VAN VECHTEN/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS