The Persistence of Memory

What the painting shows

A bay at evening, seen from a shelf of bare ground. On the right, cliffs of yellow rock catch the last light above still water. Everything else is in shadow.

Four watches are in the picture. One hangs over the branch of a dead tree, one droops off the edge of a wooden block, one lies over a soft grey form on the ground, and one, a closed orange pocket watch, sits on the block covered in ants. Three of the four have gone limp. The fourth has not, and it is the one being eaten.

The grey form in the centre is a head, seen in profile, lying on its side with its eye shut and one long lash trailing. It has a nose, a closed eyelid and a tongue, and no skull to hold them. The same profile appears across Dalí's paintings of these years, including The Great Masturbator, painted two summers earlier.

The cliffs are not invented. The Museum of Modern Art's catalogue identifies them as the coast of Catalonia, which is where Dalí lived and painted for most of his life.[1]

Reading the picture, detail by detail

The Persistence of Memory is small enough that the whole painting fits at true size on a laptop screen. At that scale the impossible objects (soft watches, a head with no skull) are painted at the same size as the observed ones (the cliffs, the ants), and the mixture is easier to read. Six passages are worth looking at closely.

The watch draped over the dead tree branch is the clearest demonstration of Dalí's method. The gold case has softened until it hangs on both sides of the branch like a piece of fabric, but the Roman numerals on the face are painted precisely, in the academic miniature technique Dalí was trained in. The outside of the watch has gone soft while the inside remains rigid — a mismatch that keeps the melting from looking symbolic and makes it look observed.

The dead olive tree is drawn from the trees around Dalí's house at Port Lligat. The Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí's catalogue records that the tree in the painting is a real olive; the branch has snapped and the bark is split. Dalí spent his life painting Cap de Creus, and every element here that is not impossible is copied from what he could see out his window.[3]

The ants on the closed pocket watch are painted so small — each one perhaps two millimetres across — that the whole colony reads at a glance as a rust-coloured stain on the watch's back. Up close each ant is drawn with legs and thorax. Ants recur in Dalí's paintings of these years and consistently mark decay: they appear on a hand in the film Un Chien Andalou (1929), which Dalí made with Luis Buñuel, and they cover the mouth in The Great Masturbator (1929). Here they are eating the one watch that has not gone soft.

The soft head in the centre is Dalí's recurring self-profile: the same closed eye, single long lash, limp nose, and open mouth with a tongue that had appeared in The Great Masturbator two summers earlier. Here it lies on its side on the ground with no skull under it, its cheek pressed into the sand, one soft watch draped across its temple. It is a portrait of the painter asleep, or unconscious, with time melting over him.

The cliffs on the right are the Cap de Creus headland at the north end of Dalí's coast — the specific yellow rock formation that had been the subject of his paintings since he was a teenager. He painted them in Port Lligat itself, from a window that faced them. The light is the low horizontal light of late afternoon in early spring, when the yellow rock takes the sun and the water is already in shadow — the exact hour Dalí spent his whole life photographing and painting.[3]

The still water of the bay stretches from the base of the cliffs almost to the foreground — no waves, no ripples, the surface completely flat. Dalí was painting the specific stillness of the Port Lligat bay at late afternoon, when the wind that had blown through the day drops and the water reflects the sky. He treated the still water as one of the picture's most stable elements. Nothing in the water melts, decays, or bends: the water alone in the painting behaves the way water behaves.

The foreground is bare packed earth, a flat golden-brown plane running from the shore back to the wooden block. Nothing grows there. Dalí painted the long shadow of the wooden block stretching across the ground toward the viewer, using the low-angle late-afternoon light to give the whole scene the feel of an empty stage. The soft head and the watches sit on this ground as if placed there by someone who has since walked out of frame.

The signature at the lower left reads 'Olive Salvador Dalí 1931.' Dalí signed almost none of his paintings with the word 'Olive' — the exception is this canvas and a small cluster of works from the same summer at Port Lligat. The best reading is that 'Olive' refers to the olive tree in the picture and the olive groves outside his door, so the signature is Dalí's private inscription of the place where the painting was made.[3]

It is smaller than a sheet of paper

The canvas is 24.1 by 33 centimetres. A sheet of A4 paper is 21 by 29.7. The image is known worldwide from reproductions printed larger than the painting.[1]

The scale matters to how it was made. At this size the ants are a few millimetres across and the watch faces are the width of a thumbnail, which is the sort of precision Dalí wanted: the technique of an academic miniature applied to an image that cannot be true.

Where the soft watches came from

Dalí's own explanation was food. MoMA's catalogue quotes him calling the limp watches "the camembert of time".[1]

The other explanation, repeated everywhere, is that the watches illustrate Einstein's relativity. This is worth stating plainly: it appears in no statement by Dalí, in no line of MoMA's record of the painting, and in no entry of the Fundació's catalogue raisonné. The version usually cited, in which Dalí is asked directly and answers that the watches are camembert rather than relativity, circulates without a primary source attached to it.[4]

What can be said is that the painting was made in a year when the softening of hard objects was already Dalí's working method, and that the first published explanation of it came from him and was about cheese.

The method behind it

Dalí arrived at what he called the paranoiac-critical method around 1930, the year before this painting. The idea was to induce the state in which a mind under delusion sees one thing as another, hold that state deliberately, and then paint the result with the discipline of a nineteenth-century academic.[5]

The Persistence of Memory is the method's clearest small demonstration. Nothing in it is loosely painted. The impossible part is not the handling; it is the fact that watches behave like cloth and a face lies on the ground without a body, rendered with exactly the care a still life would get.

How it reached New York in three years

The painting was shown in Paris at the Galerie Pierre Colle between 3 and 15 June 1931, as number 23 in the catalogue. From Colle it went to the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, which through the thirties was the main American route for Surrealism, and it was exhibited there in 1932 alongside a showing at the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art in Cambridge.[3]

In 1934 Helen Resor bought it from Levy, and in the same year it entered the Museum of Modern Art as object 162.1934 with the credit line "Given anonymously". Dalí was thirty.[1]

The tiny painting became news overnight

The canvas had remained unsold when it was first shown in Paris. Its first New York exhibition, in January 1932, changed the scale of its reputation almost immediately. MoMA's account calls it an overnight sensation. The dealer Julien Levy described it as "10 by 14 inches of Dalí dynamite," and an image of the painting appeared in nearly every review.[4]

That reception helps explain a strange fact about the work: the reproduction became large before the object did. Long before posters and book covers made the soft watches universal, reviews had already turned a canvas smaller than a sheet of paper into the image through which many viewers first met Dalí.

Where to see the original

The original belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At the latest check of MoMA's collection record, it was on view on Floor 5 in Gallery 517, the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Galleries. Displays can change, so check the museum's object page before making a special trip.[2]

It is not normally at the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres. The painting travelled there for the first time on a temporary loan from 16 January to 18 March 2009. The Fundació noted that MoMA rarely lends it—a useful correction for visitors who reasonably expect Dalí's most famous painting to be in the museum he built around his own work.[6]

Why the painting matters

The Persistence of Memory is the picture most people see when they picture Surrealism. Reproduced on posters, book covers and mugs, the soft watches long ago left the canvas and became a general sign for the dreamlike and the strange — used, often, by people who could not name the painter.

Two things carry that reach. The image is instantly legible: everyone knows what a watch is, and what it means for one to melt. And it is executed with a control that makes the impossible look observed rather than invented. The Surrealists prized dream imagery; here the movement got a picture a person could grasp in a second and not forget.

The title, and what it does not say

The title is Dalí's own, and it does not mention clocks. "The Persistence of Memory" names the one thing in the picture that does not soften — memory — holding its shape while time, in the watches, goes limp.[1]

We leave the reading there. Anything tighter — the watches as mortality, as relativity, as the unconscious — is interpretation laid over a title Dalí left deliberately open.

The version Dalí made twenty years later

Dalí returned to the scene two decades on. The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, painted between 1952 and 1954, breaks the same bay, dead tree and watches into floating blocks and horn-like forms — the earlier dream re-seen through the atomic physics of his later "nuclear mysticism".[3]

It hangs at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, and is the reason the 1931 canvas is sometimes called the original melting-clocks painting.

More by Salvador Dalí

Painting · Nuclear mysticismChrist of Saint John of the Cross1951Painting · Nuclear mysticismCrucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)1954Painting · Return to classicismGalarina1945Painting · Nuclear mysticismGalatea in Creationc. 1954Painting · Nuclear mysticismGalatea of the Spheres1952Painting · Nuclear mysticismLeda Atomica1947–49Sculpture · SurrealismLobster Telephone1938Painting · SurrealismPortrait of Gala with Two Chops Balanced on Her Shoulderc. 1934Painting · Nuclear mysticismThe Ecumenical Councilc. 1960Painting · SurrealismThe Great Masturbator1929Painting · Nuclear mysticismThe Madonna of Portlligat1950Painting · Nuclear mysticismThe Meditative Rose1958Painting · Nuclear mysticismThe Sacrament of the Last Supper1955Film · SurrealismUn Chien Andalou1929Painting · SurrealismMetamorphosis of Narcissus1937Painting · SurrealismSwans Reflecting Elephants1937Painting · SurrealismThe Burning Giraffec. 1937Painting · Nuclear mysticismThe Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory1952–1954Painting · Late double-image paintingThe Hallucinogenic Toreador1969–1970