Melted watch. The most famous and most discussed painting by S. Dali is “The Persistence of Memory.” Impression of the artist's work

Painting "The Persistence of Memory" 1931.

The most famous and most discussed painting by Salvador Dali among artists. The painting is in the Museum contemporary art V 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. “...When I decided to write a watch, I painted it 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 clam - 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, professor Russian Academy painting, sculpture and architecture, “children’s impression of bat wounded animal 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 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. - Ed.) is embodied in the 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.

Salvador Dali can rightfully be called the greatest surrealist. Streams of consciousness, dreams and reality were reflected in all his works. “The Persistence of Memory” is one of the smallest (24x33 cm), but most discussed paintings. This canvas stands out deep subtext and many encrypted characters. It is also the artist’s most copied work.

Salvador Dali himself said that he created the dials in the painting in two hours. His wife Gala went to the cinema with friends, and the artist stayed at home, citing a headache. Alone, he looked around the room. Then Dali’s attention was attracted by the Camembert cheese that he and Gala had recently eaten. It slowly melted in the sun.

Suddenly an idea occurred to the master, and he went to his workshop, where the landscape of the outskirts of Port Ligat was already painted on canvas. Salvador Dali spread his palette and began to create. By the time my wife arrived home, the painting was ready.

There are many allusions and metaphors hidden on the small canvas. Art historians are happy to decipher all the mysteries of “The Persistence of Memory.”

The three clocks represent the present, past and future. Their “melting” form is a symbol of subjective time, unevenly filling space. Another clock with ants swarming on it - this is linear time, which consumes itself. Salvador Dali has repeatedly admitted that he was influenced by strong impression the sight of ants swarming on a dead bat.

A certain spread object with eyelashes is a self-portrait of Dali. The artist associated the deserted shore with loneliness, and the dried tree with ancient wisdom. On the left in the picture you can see the mirror surface. It can reflect both reality and the world of dreams.

After 20 years, Dali’s view of the world changed. He created a painting called “Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory.” In concept it had something in common with “The Persistence of Memory”, however new era technological progress left its mark on the author’s worldview. The dials gradually disintegrate, and the space is divided into ordered blocks and flooded with water.

The permanence of the memory of Salvador Dali or, as is popularly accepted, soft watch- this is perhaps the master’s most pop picture. 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 of Modern 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 in a soft watch like a blanket and, apparently, sleeping and having 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.

S. Dali. The constancy of memory, 1931.

The most famous and most discussed painting by Salvador Dali among artists. The painting has been 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 depicted the image of a deserted shore, thereby expressing 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 some very tasty cheese, then I was left alone, sitting with my elbows on the table, thinking about how “super soft” the processed cheese was.

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 the amazing property of human memory, which allows us to be transported again to those days that have long been 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.

Plot

Dali, like a true 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, a familiar clock, the sea, a rocky landscape, a dried 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 nonlinear, subjective time, flowing arbitrarily and unevenly filling space.

Dali came up with the molten watch while thinking about Camembert.

A solid clock infested with ants is linear time that eats itself. The image of insects as a symbol of rot and decomposition haunted Dali since childhood, when he saw insects swarming on the carcass of a bat.

But Dali called flies the fairies of the Mediterranean: “They brought 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 blurred object with eyelashes. “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.”

Salvador Dali

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

The deserted shore is the cry of the artist’s soul, who through this image speaks of his emptiness, loneliness and melancholy. “Here (at Cape Creus in Catalonia - editor's note),” he wrote, “the most important principle of my theory of paranoid metamorphoses is embodied in rocky granite... These are frozen clouds, reared by an explosion in all their countless guises, more and more new - only change your perspective a little."

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

Dali took the image of the egg as a symbol of life from ancient mystics. The latter believed that 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.

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

Context

According to the 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 some very tasty cheese, then I was left alone, sitting with my elbows on the table, thinking about how “super soft” the processed cheese was. 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.”

Gala: no one will be able to forget this soft watch after seeing it at least once

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

"Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory"

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

By creating all this diversity, Dali also invented himself - from his mustache to his hysterical behavior. He saw how much talented people, which were not noticed. Therefore, the artist regularly reminded himself of himself in the most eccentric manner possible.

Dali on the roof of his house in Spain

Dali even turned his death 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 walled up in the floor in one of the rooms of his house in Figueres.