Skylar Miller-Torok
Professor Sutherlin
ENGL 1302 S07
12 April 2018
Visual Analysis: The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí is known world-wide as one of the most iconic surrealist painters of all time. His painting The Persistence of Memory is one of the most well-known and popular pieces he’s ever created. Painted by Dali in Spain in 1931, The Persistance of Memory would pave the way for other surrealist artists to create their own paintings. He describes it as a “hand-painted dream photograph” because he would often paint exact snapshot images of what would appear in his dreams. Dali would actually self-induce his own hallucinations so that he would be able to use his unconscious mind while painting. He referred to this process of hallucination as paranoic-critical method. He later wrote, “I am the first to be surprised and often terrified by the images I see appear upon my canvas. I register without choice and with all possible exactitude the dictates of my subconscious, my dreams….”. although he claimned he was terrified by many of the images he saw, he painted them in a very meaningful and precise way.
Surrealism initially started in literature in the 1920s with Dadaist writer Andre Breton. Breton’s writings “aimed at nothing less than a total transformation of the way people thought”. Eventually surrealism made it’s way into art. Surrealist artists aimed to create and expose and imaginative and hallucinogenic form of imagery by utilizing the conscious and unconscious mind. Realism is described as “an attack on the rational”, which is why it is so appealing to so many different people. Many surrealists have thought to have taken inspiration from Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist and psychologist that was obsessed with the unconscious mind. Dali was not an exception. Surrealists argue that the rational is just as important as the irrational, and that irrationalism has been sublimated by people. Dali once said, “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision”.
In The Persistence of Memory, Dali paints a bright, arid, ocean-esque background with a rocky land mass on the left side, and what looks to be a blue wooden platform on the right side. In the foreground, there are three melting stop watches. One silver watch is hanging from the branch of the only plant in sight, which happens to be dead, and is sitting on a thicker and larger wooden platform. The other gold watch is melting off the side of the same wooden platform, with a normal looking bronze colored watch next to it. The bronze watch is crawling with black ants of various sizes. The last watch is laying on what is a rubbery looking creature that appears to be distorted image of the artist himself, flattened and stretched.
The painting itself seems to be very odd and random, but in fact has a much deeper meaning. Time seems to respond to the environment how we as people respond to the environment – in a way that is naturalistic and changing, unlike the traditional idea of time. Dali sees time in this painting as something that is subjective – something that tends to contract and expand based on our own personal experiences as humans. He seems to imply how ridiculous it is that we as people try to define and explain time in a way that makes it seem like we have control, when in reality we do not. Dali is showing that clocks are a futile attempt to measure time, which is in fact unmeasurable. Mastering what he called “the usual paralyzing tricks of eye-fooling,” Dalí painted this painting using “the most imperialist fury of precision to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.” His goal was to create confusion and questioning in his audience, and that is what he did.
The four clocks are the main focus of The Persistence of Memory and are very prominently displayed in what is otherwise a very plain scene. These clocks “melting away” are symbolic of how time “melts away” in our dreams. We are unable to have any sense of time while we are dreaming. Time is useless and irrelevant in our dreams. Sarcasm and dark humor plays a large role in surrealism, and Dali’s painting is no exception. The ants that appear to be eating the bronze colored clock away also symbolize the decaying of time. Time is shown to be made fun of throughout the painting for its unimportance. Many have even suggested that the watches in this painting relate to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity – the theory that what we perceive as gravity is just the curvature of space and time. “It is not unreasonable to associate the watches in The Persistence of Memory with ideas about the passage of time and the relation between actual time and remembered time,” writes author and Art History Professor Robert Radford, “but probably the dominant fascination for Dalí was the paradox of rendering the hardest, most mechanical of objects into its present soft, wilting form.” The iconography used in the painting, with the figure in the center of the painting, suggests that it is also in a dream state. The landscape is belived to represent his own arid home in north–eastern Catalonia, where he spent his childhood.
Dali uses line, value, shape, form, texture, and color in various ways. He uses value to give a shadow and three-dimensional effect throughout the landscape on the ground, the watches, the dead tree, and the wooden platforms. He uses texture to show the rigged sharpness of the rocky land mass, the softness of the watches, the rubbery clay like texture of the sleeping creature, and the hard-wooden effect of the platforms. Form is used in the melting shape of the watches, the three-dimensional shape of the platforms, and the shape of the rocks. The color scheme and shadowing of the painting is what really brings his work to life. The most detailed part of the painting is the rocky land form in the background, suggesting he took significant time on this aspect of the painting so that it would draw attention by the viewer. The colors are mostly dark and saturated, with the exception of the light blues shown in the clocks and the skyline. Dali uses shadow and color together to create an eerie visual. The colors in the painting are primarily warm colors, including a lot of dark browns, light browns, yellows, oranges, and golds. These colors are most likely used to show sunset, and are used to show that just another ordinary day has passed. The only cool color in the painting is the blue in the watches and on the platform in the background.
Dali is known for frequently displaying the contrasting visual appearance of hard and soft textures, and he displays that in The Persistence of Memory. The hardness off the wooden platforms in contrasted by the softness of the clocks, and the fleshy human like creature in the center of the painting. Dali effectively is able to use contrast to create a very realistic painting. Dawn Adès writes, "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". Dali shows that nothing, not even time, is a fixed and set idea. He says, “I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait”. He found that people are forever changing, and that if you believe something looks a certain way, it will in reality look that way.
Throughout his life, Dali made many influential and creative paintings, but The Persistence of Memory is perhaps the most philosophical and thought inducing of them all. Dali is effectively able to create an other worldly affect in this painting that is extremely realistic in appearance, yet completely extraordinary. Dali was a pioneer for many other surrealist artists and authors, an was arguably the most notorious figure of surrealism. Without Dali, Surrealism would most likely have had much less of an impact of past and present day psychology, culture, art and dream translations.