The soft watch gave a description of the painting. “The Persistence of Memory” was written by Salvador Dali at the peak of his passion for Freud’s theories.
Without exaggeration, Salvador Dali can be called the most famous surrealist of the 20th century, because his name is familiar even to those who are completely far from painting. Some people consider him the greatest genius, others - a madman. But both the first and second unconditionally recognize the artist’s unique talent. His paintings are an irrational combination of real objects deformed in a paradoxical way. Dali was a hero of his time: the master’s work was discussed both in the highest circles of society and among the proletarians. He became a true embodiment of surrealism with the freedom of spirit, inconsistency and shockingness inherent in this painting movement. Today, anyone can access masterpieces created by Salvador Dali. The paintings, photos of which can be seen in this article, are capable of impressing every fan of surrealism.
The role of Gala in Dali's work
Salvador Dali left behind a huge creative legacy. Paintings with titles that evoke mixed feelings among many today attract art lovers so much that they deserve detailed consideration and description. The artist’s inspiration, model, support and main fan was his wife Gala (an emigrant from Russia). All his most famous paintings were painted during his life together with this woman.
The Hidden Meaning of "The Persistence of Memory"
When considering Salvador Dali, it is worth starting with his most recognizable work - “The Persistence of Memory” (sometimes called “Time”). The canvas was created in 1931. The artist was inspired to paint the masterpiece by his wife Gala. According to Dali himself, the idea for the painting arose from the sight of something melting under the sun's rays. What did the master want to say by depicting a soft clock on canvas against the backdrop of a landscape?
The three soft dials decorating the foreground of the picture are identified with subjective time, which flows freely and unevenly fills all available space. The number of hours is also symbolic, because the number 3 on this canvas indicates the past, present and future. The soft state of the objects indicates the relationship between space and time, which was always obvious to the artist. There is also a solid clock in the picture, depicted with the dial down. They symbolize objective time, the course of which goes against humanity.
Salvador Dali also depicted his self-portrait on this canvas. The painting “Time” contains in the foreground an incomprehensible spread object framed by eyelashes. It was in this image that the author painted himself sleeping. In a dream, a person releases his thoughts, which while awake he carefully hides from others. Everything that can be seen in the picture is Dali’s dream - the result of the triumph of the unconscious and the death of reality.
Ants crawling on the body of a solid watch symbolize decay and rotting. In the painting, insects are arranged in the form of a dial with arrows and indicate that objective time destroys itself. A fly sitting on a soft watch was a symbol of inspiration for the painter. Ancient Greek philosophers spent a lot of time surrounded by these “Mediterranean fairies” (this is what Dali called flies). The mirror visible in the picture on the left is evidence of the impermanence of time; it reflects both objective and subjective worlds. The egg in the background symbolizes life, the dry olive symbolizes forgotten ancient wisdom, and eternity.
“Giraffe on Fire”: interpretation of images
By studying the paintings of Salvador Dali with descriptions, you can study the artist’s work more deeply and better understand the subtext of his paintings. In 1937, the artist’s brush produced the work “Giraffe on Fire.” This was a difficult period for Spain, since a little earlier it began. In addition, Europe was on the threshold of World War II, and Salvador Dali, like many progressive people of that time, felt its approach. Despite the fact that the master claimed that his “Giraffe on Fire” has nothing to do with the political events shaking the continent, the picture is thoroughly saturated with horror and anxiety.
In the foreground, Dali painted a woman standing in a pose of despair. Her hands and face are bloody, and it looks like their skin has been torn off. The woman looks helpless, she is unable to resist the impending danger. Behind her is a lady with a piece of meat in her hands (it is a symbol of self-destruction and death). Both figures stand on the ground thanks to thin supports. Dali often depicted them in his works to emphasize human weakness. The giraffe, after which the painting is named, is painted in the background. He is much smaller than the women, his upper body is on fire. Despite his small size, he is the main character of the canvas, embodying the monster bringing the apocalypse.
Analysis of "Premonitions of Civil War"
It was not only in this work that Salvador Dali expressed his premonition of war. Paintings with titles indicating its approach appeared by the artist more than once. A year before “Giraffe,” the artist painted “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans” (otherwise known as “Premonition of the Civil War”). The structure of human body parts, depicted in the center of the canvas, resembles the outlines of Spain on a map. The structure on top is too bulky, it hangs over the ground and can collapse at any moment. Beans are scattered below the building, which look completely out of place here, which only emphasizes the absurdity of the political events taking place in Spain in the second half of the 30s.
Description of "Faces of War"
“The Face of War” is another work left by the surrealist to his fans. The painting dates from 1940 - a time when Europe was engulfed in hostilities. The canvas depicts a human head with a face frozen in agony. She is surrounded on all sides by snakes, and instead of eyes and mouth she has countless skulls. It seems that the head is literally stuffed with death. The painting symbolizes the concentration camps that took the lives of millions of people.
Interpretation of "Dream"
“The Dream” is a painting by Salvador Dali, created by him in 1937. It depicts a huge sleeping head supported by eleven thin supports (exactly the same as those of the women in the painting “Giraffe on Fire”). Crutches are everywhere, they support the eyes, forehead, nose, lips. The person has no body, but has an unnaturally stretched back thin neck. The head represents sleep, and the crutches indicate support. As soon as each part of the face finds its support, the person collapses into the world of dreams. It's not just people who need support. If you look closely, in the left corner of the canvas you can see a small dog, whose body is also leaning on a crutch. You can also think of supports as threads that allow your head to float freely during sleep, but do not allow it to completely lift off the ground. The blue background of the canvas further emphasizes the detachment of what is happening on it from the rational world. The artist was sure that this is exactly what a dream looks like. The painting by Salvador Dali was included in his series of works “Paranoia and War”.
Images of Gala
Salvador Dali also painted his beloved wife. Paintings with the names “Angelus Gala”, “Madonna of Port Ligata” and many others directly or indirectly indicate the presence of Dyakonova in the plots of the works of the genius. For example, in “Galatea with Spheres” (1952), he depicted his life partner as a divine woman, whose face is visible through a large number of spheres. The wife of a genius hovers above the real world in the upper ethereal layers. His muse became the main character in such paintings as “Galarina,” where she is depicted with her left breast exposed, and “Atomic Leda,” in which Dali presented his naked wife as the ruler of Sparta. Almost all the female images present on the canvases were inspired by the painter’s faithful wife.
Impression of the artist's work
High-resolution photographs depicting paintings by Salvador Dali allow you to study his work down to the smallest detail. The artist lived a long life and left behind several hundred works. Each of them is a unique and incomparable inner world, depicted by a genius named Salvador Dali. Pictures with names known to everyone since childhood can inspire, cause delight, bewilderment or even disgust, but not a single person will remain indifferent after viewing them.
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 completed.
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 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 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 himself created, 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.
The Persistence of the Memory of Salvador Dali, or, as is popularly known, the soft watch, is perhaps the master’s most poppy 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 hippopotamuses 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 the memory of Salvador Dali, description of the painting.
The painting depicts the lifeless landscape of the notorious Port Lligat, where Salvador spent a significant part of his life. In the foreground in the left corner there is a piece of something 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. A similar image is present in so many of Salvadorich’s paintings that it is quite difficult not to recognize it (for example, in) Soft Dali is wrapped in a 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.” Such things.
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.
In early August 1929, young Dali met his future wife and muse Gala. Their union became the key to the artist’s incredible success, influencing all of his subsequent work, including the painting “The Persistence of Memory.”
Salvador Dali and Gala in Cadaques. 1930 Photo: courtesy of the Pushkin Museum im. A.S. Pushkin
History of creation
They say that Dali was slightly out of his mind. Yes, he suffered from paranoid syndrome. But without this there would have been no Dali as an artist. He experienced mild delirium, expressed in the appearance of dream-like images in his mind, which the artist could transfer to canvas. The thoughts that visited Dali while creating his paintings were always bizarre (it was not for nothing that he was fond of psychoanalysis), and a striking example of this is the story of the appearance of one of his most famous works, “The Persistence of Memory” (New York, Museum of Modern Art).
It was in the summer of 1931 in Paris, when Dali was preparing for a personal exhibition. After taking his common-law wife Gala with friends to the cinema, “I,” Dali writes in his memoirs, “returned to the table (we ended the dinner with excellent Camembert) and plunged into thoughts about the spreading pulp. Cheese appeared in my mind's eye. I got up and, as usual, headed 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 carcass 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 which one? I have not the foggiest idea. 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, they hang pitifully from an olive branch. Despite the migraine, I prepared my palette and got to work. Two hours later, by the time Gala returned, the most famous of my paintings was finished.”
(1) Soft watch- a symbol of nonlinear, subjective time, arbitrarily flowing 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 was thinking about Einstein when I drew the soft clock ( This refers to 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 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 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 watch- lie on the left with the dial down - 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 swarming with ants, 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 anus for the rest of his life.” painting. ( “I loved to remember nostalgically this action, which in fact did not happen,” the artist will write in “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, Told by Himself.” - Approx. ed.). 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 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 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 (which is why 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 is embodied in rocky granite ( flow of one delusional image into another. - Approx. ed.... These are frozen clouds, reared up by an explosion, in all their countless guises, more and more new - you just have to slightly change the angle of view.”
(8) Sea for 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.
Artist
Salvador Dali
The great Spanish artist Salvador Filipe Jacinto Dali y Domenech was born in the spring of 1904, on May 11th at 08:45...
Brief biographical information
1904 On May 11th, Salvador Dali Domanech was born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain.
1910 Dalí begins attending the Christian Brothers' Immaculate Conception elementary school.
1916 Summer holiday with the Pichot family. Dali encounters modern painting for the first time.
1917 Spanish artist Nunez teaches Dali the methods of original engraving.
1919 First exhibition in a group show at the Municipal Theater in Figueres. Dali - 15 years old.
1921 Death of mother.
1922 Dalí takes the entrance exam to the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid.
1923 Temporary expulsion from the Academy.
1925 First professional solo exhibition at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona.
1926 First trip to Paris and Brussels. Meeting with Picasso. Final expulsion from the Academy.
Leda Atomica 1949A Dream Inspired by the Flight of a Bee 1943
Last Supper 1955
Temptation of Saint Anthony 1946
1929 Collaboration with Louis Buñuel in the production of the film Un Chien Andalou. Meeting with Gala Eluard. First exhibition in Paris.
1930 Dalí resides with Gala in Port Ligat, Spain.
1931 Painting "The Persistence of Memory".
1934 The painting "The Mystery of William Tell" quarrels Dali with a group of surrealists. Civil marriage with Gala. Trip to New York. Albert Skira publishes 42 original engravings by Dali.
1936 Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Paintings "Autumn of Cannibalism", "Soft Hours", "Warning of Civil War".
1938 Conversation with the sick Sigmund Freud in London. Dali takes part in the international exhibition of surrealists in Paris.
1939 Final expulsion from the Surrealist group due to Dali's unwillingness to support their political causes.
1940 Dali and Gala emigrate to America where they live for eight years, first in Virginia, then in California and New York.
1941 Retrospective exhibition with Miro at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
1942 Publication of the autobiography “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, Told by Himself.”
1946 Participation in the project of the film "Destino" by Walt Disney. Participation in the Alfred Hitchcock film project. Painting "The Temptation of Saint Anthony".
1949 Paintings "Leda Atomica" and Madonna Port-Ligat" (version 1). Return to Europe.
1957 Publication of twelve original lithographs by Dali, entitled Pages of the Quest of Don Quixote of La Mancha.
1958 Wedding of Gala and Dali in Girona, Spain.
1959 Painting "Discovery of America by Columbus".
1962 Dali enters into a ten-year agreement with publisher Pierre Arguillet to publish illustrations./>
1965 Dali signs a contract with the publishing house of Sidney Lucas, New York.
1967 Acquisition of Pubol Castle in Girona and its reconstruction.
1969 Ceremonial move into Pubol Castle.
1971 Opening of the Salvador Dali Museum in Cleveland, Ohio.
1974 Dali begins to have health problems.
1982 Opening of the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. Death of Gala in Pubol Castle.
1983 Grand exhibition of Dali's works in Spain, Madrid and Barcelona. Completion of painting classes. The last painting is "Swallow's Tail".
1989 January 23 Dali died of cardiac paralysis. He is buried in the crypt of the Tatro Museum, in Figueres, Spain.
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 many talented people were overlooked. 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.
