The Persistence of Memory

• 1. Introduction

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  The Persistence of Memory hung in a New York gallery for the first time in 1932, and on that day it sold for just $250. Salvador Dalí had painted it a year earlier, and today it counts among the most recognizable works of Surrealism ever made. Two years after that first sale, in 1934, an anonymous donor gave the painting to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It has stayed there ever since.

  Most people who have seen this canvas do not know its official name. They call it "The Melting Clocks," "The Soft Watches," or "The Melting Watches," the more descriptive titles that stuck in popular memory. But behind the image everyone recognizes lies a set of questions Dalí never fully answered. Why did he choose watches, of all objects, to soften? Whose face is hidden in the landscape beneath them? And why does one clock, covered in ants, refuse to melt at all?

• 2. Softness and Hardness

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  Art historian Dawn Adès called the soft watches "an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order." Her reading ties the image to Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, suggesting Dalí had absorbed a new scientific picture of the universe.

  Physicist Ilya Prigogine once asked Dalí directly whether relativity had shaped the image. Dalí said no. He explained that the soft watches came instead from a surrealist perception of a Camembert cheese melting in the sun.

  The year before he painted The Persistence of Memory, Dalí developed what he called his paranoiac-critical method. It meant deliberately inducing psychotic hallucinations to fuel his art. He put it simply: "The difference between a madman and me is that I am not mad." That claim to sanity sits just behind the painting's centerpiece, where an even stranger figure waits.

• 3. The Sleeping Face

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  Beneath the rightmost clock, in the very center of the canvas, lies a distorted human face shown in profile. A monstrous, fleshy creature drapes across that center of the painting, thick with texture near its face and heavy with contrast and tone. It reads as both alien and familiar. Closer study reveals it as an approximation of Dalí's own face, turning the painting into something of a self-portrait.

  Similar fleshy beings turn up often in Dalí's other work, most notably a figure resembling the one in his earlier painting The Great Masturbator. This particular creature appears to trace back further still, to a figure in the Paradise section of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. It was a painting Dalí had studied closely.

  Dream logic governs the shape of this figure. It can be read as a "fading" creature, the kind that appears in dreams when the dreamer cannot quite pin down its exact form. One closed eye, fringed with several eyelashes, marks the creature as caught somewhere inside its own dream. The clocks may follow the same logic, marking time as it lingers in the eyes of someone asleep, not as it passes in waking life.

• 4. Ants and the Wounded Bat

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  The orange watch at the painting's bottom left corner is the only one that does not melt, its surface instead crawling with ants. Its firmness stands apart from the soft, dreamlike watches around it, a fixed point in an otherwise warped scene. Ants used this way, as a stand-in for decay, show up again and again across Dalí's body of work.

  In a 1929 essay called "The Liberation of Fingers," published in the magazine L'amic de les arts, Dalí recalled a childhood memory. He described watching a lizard decompose, eaten by ants, when he was three or four years old.

  A second memory, recounted in his book The Secret of Life, cuts even deeper. His cousin once gave him a wounded bat, which the young Dalí adored and left overnight in a pail in the wash-house. He later wrote: "Next morning a frightful spectacle awaited me. When I reached the back of the wash-house I found the glass had overturned, and the bat, though still half alive, was bristling with frenzied ants."

  A fly perched on the leftmost, open-faced watch tells its own small story. Caught in the sun, it appears to cast a shadow shaped like a human being.

• 5. The Catalan Landscape

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  The craggy rocks on the right side of the canvas are not invented. They represent the tip of the Cap de Creus peninsula in the far northeast of Catalonia. Much of Dalí's work draws on the landscapes he knew from his life in that region.

  The strange, foreboding shadow across the painting's foreground points to a real place too: Puig Pení, a mountain in Catalonia's northeast corner. The elongated, distorted tree on the left of the canvas became one of Dalí's most recognizable recurring figures. It shows up again and again, almost like a signature, across his career.

  Dalí would return to this same craggy shoreline and its bent tree decades later, when he decided to take the entire painting apart.

• 6. After the Original

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  In 1954, Dalí revisited the theme in a new work titled The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory. The new painting shows the earlier, famous image breaking apart into a grid of smaller rectangular blocks, with further imagery visible through the gaps between them. He also added something new to the scene: an ominous suggestion of bullets.

  The Disintegration now hangs in the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. The original never moved from New York.

  Late in his career, Dalí carried the same soft-watch imagery into other forms as well, producing lithographs and sculptures on the theme. Some of those sculpted pieces carried names of their own: Persistence of Memory, Nobility of Time, Profile of Time, and Three Dancing Watches.