The Persistence of Memory

Artist                   Salvador Dali

Year                    1931

Type                    Oil on canvas

Dimensions          24 cm × 33 cm (9.5 in × 13 in)

Location               Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Salvador Dali was a Spanish Surreal Artist (1904 - 1989).

The well-known surrealist piece introduced the image of the soft melting pocket watch in landscape. It epitomizes Dali’s theory of "softness" and "hardness", which was central to his thinking at the time Dawn Ades wrote "The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order.’’

This interpretation suggests that Dali was incorporating an understanding of the world introduced by Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. Asked by Ilya Prigogine whether this was in fact the case, Dali replied that the soft watches were not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by the surrealist perception of a Camembert cheese melting in the sun.

Although fundamentally part of Dali’s Freudian phase, the imagery precedes his transition to his scientific phase by fourteen years, which occurred after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The iconography may refer to a dream that Dali himself had experienced, and the clocks may symbolize the passing of time as one experiences it in sleep or the persistence of time in the eyes of the dreamer. The orange clock at the bottom left of the painting is covered in ants. Dali often used ants in his paintings as a symbol of decay.

The Persistence of Memory employs "the exactitude of realist painting techniques to depict imagery more likely to be found in dreams than in waking consciousness.

The craggy rocks to the right represent a tip of Cap de Creus peninsula in north-eastern Catalonia. Many of Dali’s paintings were inspired by the landscapes of his life in Catalonia. The strange and foreboding shadow in the foreground of this painting is a reference to Mount Pani.

The Persistence of Memory is a very interesting surreal piece, seeing melting clock at the beach is a little odd for us to see, the title is pretty straight forward though, 

The Persistence of Memory, a memory is something we store in our head from the past and persistence is to be passionate about something, or to not give up on something you're doing and can't seem to succeed at it. you'll be fighting for it till you get it right.