The picture of El Salvador was given by the passing time and its description. Constancy of time

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 forms, 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 why he did just that in his “Diary of a Genius,” but this work can hardly be considered successful, it costs exactly as much as it requires mental effort. 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 different 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.

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 story of one of his most famous works, “The Persistence of Memory,” is a striking example of this.

(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 mollusk - 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 Nina Getashvili, a professor at the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, “a childhood impression of a wounded bat infested with ants, as well as the artist’s own memory 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 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) 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.

Salvador Dali became famous throughout the world thanks to his inimitable surreal style of painting. The author’s most famous works include his personal self-portrait, where he depicted himself with a neck in the style of Raphael’s brush, “Flesh on the Stones,” “Enlightened Pleasures,” and “The Invisible Man.” However, Salvador Dali wrote “The Persistence of Memory”, attaching this work to one of his most profound theories. This happened at the junction of his stylistic rethinking, when the artist joined the trend of surrealism.

"The Persistence of Memory." Salvador Dali and his Freudian theory

The famous canvas was created in 1931, when the artist was in a state of heightened excitement from the theories of his idol, the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. In general terms, the idea of ​​the painting was to convey the artist’s attitude towards softness and hardness.

Being a very self-centered person, prone to flashes of uncontrollable inspiration and at the same time carefully understanding it from the point of view of psychoanalysis, Salvador Dali, like all creative personalities, created his masterpiece under the influence of a hot summer day. As the artist himself recalls, he was puzzled by the contemplation of how the heat melted. He had previously been attracted by the theme of transforming objects into different states, which he tried to convey on canvas. The painting “The Persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dali is a symbiosis of melted cheese with an olive tree standing alone against the backdrop of the mountains. By the way, it was this image that became the prototype of the soft watch.

Description of the painting

Almost all the works of that period are filled with abstract images of human faces hidden behind the forms of foreign objects. They seem to be hidden from view, but at the same time they are the main characters. This is how the surrealist tried to depict the subconscious in his works. Salvador Dali made the central figure of the painting “The Persistence of Memory” a face that is similar to his self-portrait.

The painting seemed to have absorbed all the significant stages in the artist’s life, and also reflected the inevitable future. You can notice that in the lower left corner of the canvas you can see a closed clock completely dotted with ants. Dali often resorted to depicting these insects, which for him were associated with death. The shape and color of the clock were based on the artist's memories of one in his childhood home that was broken. By the way, the mountains visible are nothing more than a piece from the landscape of the Spaniard’s homeland.

Salvador Dali portrayed “The Persistence of Memory” as somewhat devastated. It is clearly visible that all objects are separated from each other by the desert and are not self-sufficient. Art critics believe that with this the author tried to convey his spiritual emptiness, which weighed on him at that time. In fact, the idea was to convey human anguish over the passage of time and changes in memory. Time, according to Dali, is infinite, relative and in constant motion. Memory, on the contrary, is short-lived, but its stability should not be underestimated.

Secret images in the picture

Salvador Dali wrote “The Persistence of Memory” in a couple of hours and did not bother to explain to anyone what he wanted to say with this canvas. Many art historians are still building hypotheses around this iconic work of the master, noticing in it only individual symbols that the artist resorted to throughout his entire career.

Upon closer inspection, you can see that the clock hanging from the branch on the left is shaped like a tongue. The tree on the canvas is depicted as withered, which indicates the destructive aspect of time. This work is small in size, but is considered the most powerful of all that Salvador Dali wrote. “The Persistence of Memory” is certainly the most psychologically deep picture, which maximally reveals the author’s inner world. Perhaps that is why he did not want to comment on it, leaving his fans guessing.

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's 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 a new genre of painting, with a cry displayed on canvas, he 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 the 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 children famous paintings by 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. One 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.

Salvador Dali. "Persistence of Memory"

To the 105th anniversary of his birth

The beginning of the 20th century was a time of searching for new ideas. People wanted something unusual. Experiments with words begin in literature, and experiments with images in painting. Symbolists, Fauvists, Futurists, Cubists, and Surrealists appeared.

Surrealism (from the French surrealisme - super-realism) is a movement in art, philosophy and culture, formed in the 1920s in France. The main concept of surrealism is surreality - a combination of dream and reality. Surrealism is the rules of inconsistencies, the connection of the incompatible, that is, the bringing together of images that are completely alien to each other, in a situation that is completely alien to them. The French writer is considered the founder and ideologist of surrealism.

The greatest representative of surrealism in fine art is the Spanish artist Salvador Dali (1904-1979). Since childhood I was fond of drawing. The study of the work of contemporary artists and acquaintance with the writings of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) had a decisive influence on the development of the painting method and aesthetic views of the future master. “Surrealism is me!” - said Salvador Dali. He treated his own paintings as hand-made photographs of his dreams. And they truly represent stunning combinations of the unreality of dreams and photographic images. In addition to painting, Dali studied theater, literature, art theory, ballet and cinema.

An important role in the life of the surrealist was played by his acquaintance in 1929 with (Russian-born Elena Deluvina-Dyakonova). This unusual woman became a muse and dramatically changed the artist’s life. became a legendary couple, like Dante and Beatrice.

The works of Salvador Dali are distinguished by their exceptional expressive power and are known throughout the world. He painted about two thousand paintings that never cease to amaze: a different reality, unusual images. One of the painter's famous works Persistence of memory, which is also called Melted watch, in connection with the subject of the image.

The history of the creation of this composition is interesting. One day, while waiting for Gala to return home, Dali painted a picture with a deserted beach and rocks, without any thematic focus. According to the artist himself, the image of softening time was born to him when he saw a piece of Camembert cheese, which became soft from the heat and began to melt on a plate. The natural order of things began to collapse and the image of a spreading clock appeared. Taking up his brush, Salvador Dali began to fill the desert landscape with melting clocks. Two hours later the canvas was finished. The author named his creation Persistence of memory.

Persistence of memory. 1931.
Oil on canvas. 24x33.
Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The work was created at a moment of insight, when the surrealist felt that painting could prove that everything in the Universe is connected and imbued with a single spiritual principle. Thus, under Dali’s brush, stopping time was born. Next to the soft melting watches, the author depicted hard pocket watches covered with ants, as a sign that time can move in different ways, either flow smoothly, or be corroded by corruption, which, in Dali’s opinion, meant decomposition, symbolized here by the bustle of insatiable ants. The sleeping head is a portrait of the artist himself.

The picture gives rise to a variety of associations and sensations in the viewer, which are sometimes difficult to express in words. Some people find here images of conscious and unconscious memory, others - “oscillations between ups and downs in the state of wakefulness and sleep.” Be that as it may, the author of the composition achieved the main thing - he managed to create an unforgettable work that has become a classic of surrealism. Gala, returning home, quite correctly predicted that, having seen it once, no one would forget Persistence of memory. The canvas has become a symbol of the modern concept of the relativity of time.

After the exhibition of the painting in the Paris salon of Pierre Colet, it was acquired by the New York Museum. In 1932, from January 9 to 29, she was exhibited at Julien Levy's gallery in New York, "Surrealist Painting, Drawing and Photography." Paintings and drawings by Salvador Dali, marked by unbridled imagination and virtuoso technique, are extremely popular all over the world.