The Persistence of Reminiscence (La persistencia de la memoria) (1931) is a trifecta of superlatives: Surrealism’s most well-known portray, created by its most well-known artist, that includes its most well-known motif. The painter, after all, is Salvador Dalí, and his iconic rendering of melted pocket watches is immediately recognizable to just about everybody, even these with little or no real interest in artwork.
Dalí painted The Persistence of Reminiscence when he was 28. By that point, he was already a well-established member of the Surrealist circle, having moved to their base of operation in Paris 5 years earlier. His popularity preceded his arrival because of his fellow Catalan artist Joan Miró, a Surrealist OG whose work impressed Dalí’s personal. Miró launched Dalí to André Breton, Surrealism’s founder and ideological enforcer, who welcomed Dalí into the motion—although in time, the latter’s penchant for flamboyance and self-promotion, in addition to his sympathy for fascism, would result in a really public rupture with Breton.
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However, The Persistence of Reminiscence, and Dalí’s work usually, represented the epitome of Breton’s name to “resolve the beforehand contradictory situations of dream and actuality into an absolute actuality, a super-reality.” Furthermore, Dalí’s pondering, like Breton’s, was deeply indebted to the writings of Sigmund Freud and his perception that the thoughts might be unlocked via psychoanalytical strategies such because the interpretation of goals.
Dalí added his personal peculiar twists to Surrealist ideology as nicely. For instance, when artists of various stripe started to flock to Breton’s motion, he enlisted Dalí’s help in developing with a approach of constructing artwork that would conceivably span the panoply of kinds and goals sheltering beneath the Surrealist umbrella. As a response, Dalí supplied the “Surrealist object,” a psychosexual spin, basically, on Marcel Duchamp’s Readymade technique of taking unusual, practical gadgets—a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack—out of their authentic mass-produced context and labeling them distinctive artworks. However as a substitute of puckishly violating the boundaries between artwork and life or between excessive and low tradition, as Duchamp did, Surrealist objects would dredge up repressed ideas and emotions. Dalí primarily based the concept on Freud’s principle of fetishism, which explored the erotic fixation on sneakers and different gadgets related to explicit physique components. (Dalí’s personal contributions on this regard included 1938’s Lobster Phone, a handset sheathed in a crustacean carapace.)
Extra relevantly for The Persistence of Reminiscence, although, was one other idea Dalí formulated the 12 months earlier than he painted it, which he referred to as the “paranoiac crucial” methodology. Based mostly on the notion that paranoiacs understand issues that aren’t there, Dalí’s “methodology” secreted phantom footage inside his compositions as a form of stream-of-consciousness Rorschach take a look at for viewers. Dalí referred to as this technique a “spontaneous methodology of irrational data primarily based on the crucial and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.” In different phrases, Dalí was asserting that madness offered him a mannequin for pictorial group—although, as he drily famous, “the one distinction between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.”
For his half, Breton embraced the paranoiac crucial as an “instrument of major significance”—till he didn’t: In 1939, after Dalí expressed his admiration for Hitler (saying, for instance, that he usually dreamed of the fürher as a girl whose “flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me”), Breton lastly managed to engineer Dalí’s expulsion from the Surrealist group, one thing he’d tried and didn’t do in 1934 after Dalí threw his assist to the Fascists throughout the Spanish Civil Conflict. He accused Dalí of espousing race conflict and denounced the paranoiac crucial methodology as reactionary.
The Persistence of Reminiscence was first exhibited in 1932 in a gaggle present of Surrealist artwork on the Julien Levy Gallery in New York Metropolis. Levy had acquired the portray on a visit to Paris, and it instantly turned a media sensation—the primary for a murals in New York, maybe, since Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase rocked the Armory Present in 1913. It entered the gathering of the Museum of Trendy Artwork two years later.
Dalí’s method was notable for its nearly hyperrealistic consideration to element, all with the intention of making “hand-painted dream pictures,” as he put it. His otherworldly precisionism owed rather a lot to the polished biomorphic abstractions of fellow Surrealist Yves Tanguy, a lot in order that Dalí allegedly advised Tanguy’s niece, “I pinched the whole lot out of your uncle.”
Dalí’s composition is, above all, a panorama that references geographic landmarks recalling his childhood in his native Catalonia, together with Cap de Creus, a peninsula close to Spain’s northeastern border with France, and Puig Pení, a mountain in the identical area. Each take up the scene’s background, whereas its foreground is dominated by an ectoplasmic turkey-necked type that many take as a hidden self-portrait in profile. Nevertheless it was additionally modeled after an anthropomorphic rock inside Hieronymus Bosch’s dizzying medieval masterpiece, The Backyard of Earthly Delights. (A lot of Bosch’s works offered a template for Dalí.)
As for the liquefying timepieces, there are three in all, draped respectively throughout the aforementioned determine, the department of a barren tree to its left, and an rectangular field or bench jutting in sharply from the left border of the work to function a pedestal of kinds for the tree. A fourth pocket watch can also be perched there, limned in orange, and although its form is strong, it options ants converging in radiating traces towards a gap within the center.
By Dalí’s personal admission, ants signify his obsession with decay, however the melting watches have proved a bit extra immune to interpretation. Clearly they evoke time, although some have additionally recommended a connection to Einstein’s principle of relativity. For his half, Dalí described the watches because the “camembert of time and house,” as he’d gotten the concept for them by observing a plate of the cheese softening within the solar.
As with all issues Dalí, together with the maestro himself, The Persistence of Reminiscence stays one thing of a thriller however isn’t any much less indelible for it. Certainly, one may nearly say that Dalí’s title is a self-fulfilling prophecy because the portray tenaciously holds a spot in our collective storehouse of images to today.
