The persistence of memory ((La Persistencia de la Memoria(1931) is the highest triangle: Surrealism’s most famous painting, created by its most famous artist, featuring its most famous theme. The painter, of course, is Salvador Dalí, whose iconic rendering of melted pocket watches is recognizable to almost everyone, even those with little or no interest in art.
Dali painted The persistence of memory He was 28 years old at the time. By then, he had been a mature member of the surreal circle and moved to his operating base in Paris five years ago. Thanks to his Catalan compatriot Joan Miró, his reputation was inspired by his work before his arrival. Miro introduced André Breton, the founder and ideological executor of Surrealism, and they welcomed Dalí to the movement – although in time, the latter’s preference for courage and self-support, and his sympathy for fascism, would lead to a public breakdown with Breton.
despite this, The persistence of memoryMoreover, Dali’s general works represent what Breton calls for “resolving previous contradictions of dreams and real conditions as absolute reality, microcosm of surreality.” Furthermore, Dali’s thought, like Breton, was deeply grateful to Sigmund Freud’s writings and his belief that thoughts can be unlocked through psychoanalytical methods such as interpretations of dreams.
Dalí also added his own strange twists to the surreal ideology. For example, when artists of different stripes began to flock to Breton’s action, he invited Dali’s help to propose a way to make art that could imagine, imagine, spanned a vast style and aimed at the shelter under the surreal umbrella. In response, Dali offers a “surreal object”, a psychological spin, essentially on Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made strategy of adopting ordinary functional objects (a bicycle wheel, bottle holder), the context of their original mass production and marking their unique artwork. But surreal objects do not violate the boundaries between art and life like Duchamp, or the boundaries between high and low cultures like Duchamp, but will unblock the repressed thoughts and feelings. Dalí is based on Freud’s fetishism theory, which explores the erotic fixation of shoes and other objects associated with specific body parts. (Dali’s contributions in this regard include 1938 Lobster phonea cell phone in crustacean crust. )
More relevant The persistence of memoryBut Dali proposed another concept during his year of painting, which he called the “parasitous criticism” approach. Based on the idea that paranoids believe that things do not exist, Dali’s “method” secretes phantom pictures in his work is a stream of consciousness test of the audience. Dali called this strategy “a spontaneous approach to spontaneous knowledge based on the association and interpretation of skilled phenomena”. In other words, Dalí asserted that insanity provided him with an example of painting organization, although, as he was serious, “the only difference between me and the madman is that I am not angry.”
For his part, Breton embraced the paranoiac critical as an “instrument of primary importance”—until he didn’t: In 1939, after Dalí expressed his admission for Hitler (saying, for example, that he often dreamed of the fürher as a woman whose “flesh, which I had imagined white than white, ravished me”), Breton finally managed to engineer Dalí’s expulsion from the Surrealist group, something he’d tried and after Dalí provided support to fascists during the Spanish Civil War, it failed to do so in 1934. He accused Dalí of espousing the racial war and condemned the critical approach of paranoidness as reactionary.
The persistence of memory It was first exhibited in 1932 at the Surreal Art Exhibition at Julien Levy Gallery in New York City. Levy got the painting while traveling to Paris, which immediately became a media sensation, the first work of art in New York, perhaps because of Duchamp’s Go down the stairs naked In 1913, it swung the Armory show. Two years later, it entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Dalí’s approach is almost a high-realistic focus on detail, with the aim of creating “hand-painted dream photos”, as he put it. His otherworldly precisionism is attributed to the polished biomorphic abstraction of surrealist Yves Tanguy, so much so that Dalí allegedly told Tanguy’s niece: “I pinch everything about your uncle.”
Most importantly, Dali’s composition is a landscape that references geographical landmarks, recalling his childhood in his native Catalonia, including the peninsula near the northeastern border of Spain and France and a mountain range in the same region. Both occupy the background of the scene, while its prospect is dominated by an exogenous turkey neck form, which many view as a self-portrait hidden in the profile. But it is also modeled on the anthropomorphic rocks from the dazzling medieval masterpiece of hieronymus Bosch The earthly garden. (Most of Bosch’s works provide templates for Dali.)
As for the liquefied clocks, there are three in total, draped on the above figures, the branches of the left tree, the barren branches on the left, and a rectangular box or bench that protrudes sharply from the left border of the work, which can be used as the base of the tree. There is also a fourth pocket watch, which is orange, and although its shape is solid, it is characterized by ants gathering in radiation towards the middle hole.
According to Dali’s own admission, the ant represents his obsession with decay, but the melted watch has proven to be more resistant to explanations. Apparently, they evoke time, although some have also proposed a connection to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Dalí describes the watch as “Camembert of time and space” because he softens their thoughts by observing a plate of cheese in the sun.
Like everything, including the Master himself, The persistence of memory It is still a mystery, but also indelible. Indeed, one can almost say that Dali’s title is a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the painting tenaciously holds a place in our collective image library.
