The Persistence of Memory (La persistencia de la memoria) (1931) is a trifecta of superlatives: Surrealism’s most famous painting, created by its most famous artist, featuring its most famous motif. The painter, of course, is Salvador Dalí, and his iconic rendering of melted pocket watches is instantly recognizable to nearly everyone, even those with little or no interest in art.
Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory when he was 28. By that time, he was already a well-established member of the Surrealist circle, having moved to their base of operation in Paris five years earlier. His reputation preceded his arrival thanks to his fellow Catalan artist Joan Miró, a Surrealist OG whose work inspired Dalí’s own. Miró introduced Dalí to André Breton, Surrealism’s founder and ideological enforcer, who welcomed Dalí into the movement—though in time, the latter’s penchant for flamboyance and self-promotion, as well as his sympathy for fascism, would lead to a very public rupture with Breton.
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Nevertheless, The Persistence of Memory, and Dalí’s work in general, represented the epitome of Breton’s call to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.” Moreover, Dalí’s thinking, like Breton’s, was deeply indebted to the writings of Sigmund Freud and his belief that the mind could be unlocked through psychoanalytical methods such as the interpretation of dreams.
Dalí added his own peculiar twists to Surrealist ideology as well. For example, when artists of varying stripe began to flock to Breton’s movement, he enlisted Dalí’s aid in coming up with a way of making art that could conceivably span the panoply of styles and aims sheltering under the Surrealist umbrella. As a response, Dalí offered the “Surrealist object,” a psychosexual spin, essentially, on Marcel Duchamp’s Readymade strategy of taking ordinary, functional items—a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack—out of their original mass-produced context and labeling them unique works of art. But instead of puckishly violating the boundaries between art and life or between high and low culture, as Duchamp did, Surrealist objects would dredge up repressed thoughts and feelings. Dalí based the idea on Freud’s theory of fetishism, which explored the erotic fixation on shoes and other items associated with particular body parts. (Dalí’s own contributions in this regard included 1938’s Lobster Telephone, a handset sheathed in a crustacean carapace.)
More relevantly for The Persistence of Memory, though, was another concept Dalí formulated the year before he painted it, which he called the “paranoiac critical” method. Based on the notion that paranoiacs perceive things that aren’t there, Dalí’s “method” secreted phantom pictures within his compositions as a kind of stream-of-consciousness Rorschach test for viewers. Dalí called this strategy a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.” In other words, Dalí was asserting that insanity provided him a model for pictorial organization—though, as he drily noted, “the only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.”
For his part, Breton embraced the paranoiac critical as an “instrument of primary importance”—until he didn’t: In 1939, after Dalí expressed his admiration for Hitler (saying, for example, that he often dreamed of the fürher as a woman whose “flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me”), Breton finally managed to engineer Dalí’s expulsion from the Surrealist group, something he’d tried and failed to do in 1934 after Dalí threw his support to the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. He accused Dalí of espousing race war and denounced the paranoiac critical method as reactionary.
The Persistence of Memory was first exhibited in 1932 in a group show of Surrealist art at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City. Levy had acquired the painting on a trip to Paris, and it immediately became a media sensation—the first for a work of art in New York, perhaps, since Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase rocked the Armory Show in 1913. It entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art two years later.
Dalí’s approach was notable for its almost hyperrealistic attention to detail, all with the aim of creating “hand-painted dream photographs,” as he put it. His otherworldly precisionism owed a lot to the polished biomorphic abstractions of fellow Surrealist Yves Tanguy, so much so that Dalí allegedly told Tanguy’s niece, “I pinched everything from your uncle.”
Dalí’s composition is, above all, a landscape that references geographic landmarks recalling his childhood in his native Catalonia, including Cap de Creus, a peninsula near Spain’s northeastern border with France, and Puig Pení, a mountain in the same region. Both take up the scene’s background, while its foreground is dominated by an ectoplasmic turkey-necked form that many take as a hidden self-portrait in profile. But it was also modeled after an anthropomorphic rock within Hieronymus Bosch’s dizzying medieval masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. (Much of Bosch’s works provided a template for Dalí.)
As for the liquefying timepieces, there are three in all, draped respectively across the aforementioned figure, the branch of a barren tree to its left, and an oblong box or bench jutting in sharply from the left border of the work to serve as a pedestal of sorts for the tree. A fourth pocket watch is also perched there, limned in orange, and though its shape is solid, it features ants converging in radiating lines toward a hole in the middle.
By Dalí’s own admission, ants represent his obsession with decay, but the melting watches have proved a bit more resistant to interpretation. Obviously they evoke time, though some have also suggested a connection to Einstein’s theory of relativity. For his part, Dalí described the watches as the “camembert of time and space,” as he’d gotten the idea for them by observing a plate of the cheese softening in the sun.
As with all things Dalí, including the maestro himself, The Persistence of Memory remains something of a mystery but is no less indelible for it. Indeed, one could almost say that Dalí’s title is a self-fulfilling prophecy as the painting tenaciously holds a place in our collective storehouse of imagery to this day.