Persistence of memory description of the picture. The secret meaning of the painting "permanence of memory" by Salvador Dali

In early August 1929, young Dali met his future wife and muse Gala. Their union became a pledge incredible success artist, influencing all his subsequent work, including the painting "The Persistence of Memory".

History of creation

They say that Dali was a little out of his mind. Yes, he suffered from paranoia. But without this, there would be no Dali as an artist. He had mild delirium, expressed in the appearance in the mind of dream images that the artist could transfer to the canvas. The thoughts that visited Dali during the creation of paintings were always bizarre (it was not for nothing that he was fond of psychoanalysis), and a vivid example of this is the story of the appearance of one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory (New York, Museum contemporary art).

It was the summer of 1931 in Paris, when Dali was preparing for a solo exhibition. After seeing his common-law wife Gala with friends at the cinema, “I,” Dali writes in his memoirs, “returned to the table (we finished dinner with an excellent Camembert) and plunged into thoughts about the spreading pulp. Cheese popped into my mind's eye. I got up and, as usual, went to the studio - to look at the picture I was painting before going to bed. It was the landscape of Port Lligat in the transparent, sad sunset light. In the foreground is the bare skeleton of an olive tree with a broken branch.

I felt that in this picture I managed to create an atmosphere consonant with some important image - but what? I have not the foggiest idea. I needed a marvelous image, but I did not find it. I went to turn off the light, and when I got out, I literally saw the solution: two pairs of soft clocks, they hang plaintively from an olive branch. Despite the migraine, I prepared my palette and set to work. Two hours later, by the time Gala returned, the most famous of my paintings was finished.

(1) Soft watch- a symbol of non-linear, subjective time, arbitrarily flowing and unevenly filling space. The three clocks in the picture are past, present and future. “You asked me,” Dali wrote to physicist Ilya Prigogine, “did I think about Einstein when I painted soft watches ( I mean the theory of relativity. - Approx. ed.). I answer you in the negative, the fact is that the connection between space and time was absolutely obvious to me for a long time, so there was nothing special in this picture for me, it was the same as any other ... To this I can add that I thinking about Heraclitus ancient Greek philosopher who believed that time is measured by the flow of thought. - Approx. ed.). That is why my painting is called The Persistence of Memory. Memory of the relationship of space and time.

(2) Blurred object with eyelashes. This is a self-portrait of a sleeping Dali. The world in the picture is his dream, the death of the objective world, the triumph of the unconscious. “The relationship between sleep, love and death is obvious,” the artist wrote in his autobiography. “Sleep is death, or at least it is an exclusion from reality, or, even better, it is the death of reality itself, which dies in the same way during the act of love.” According to Dali, sleep frees the subconscious, so the artist's head blurs like a clam - this is evidence of his defenselessness. Only Gala, he will say after the death of his wife, “knowing my defenselessness, hid my hermit oyster pulp in a fortress-shell, and thus saved it.”

(3) Solid watch- lie on the left with the dial down - a symbol of objective time.

(4) Ants- a symbol of decay and decay. According to Nina Getashvili, professor Russian Academy painting, sculpture and architecture, baby impression from bat a wounded animal infested with ants, as well as the artist's own memory of a bathed baby with ants in the anus for life endowed the artist with the obsessive presence of this insect in his painting. ( “I loved to nostalgically recall this action, which in fact did not take place,” the artist writes in “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, told by himself.” - Approx. ed.). On the clock on the left, the only one that has retained its hardness, the ants also create a clear cyclic structure, obeying the divisions of the chronometer. However, this does not obscure the meaning that the presence of ants is still a sign of decay.” According to Dali, linear time devours itself.

(5) Fly. According to Nina Getashvili, “the artist called them fairies of the Mediterranean. In The Diary of a Genius, Dali wrote: “They carried inspiration Greek philosophers who spent their lives under the sun covered in flies.

(6) Oliva. For the artist, this is a symbol of ancient wisdom, which, unfortunately, has already sunk into oblivion (therefore, the tree is depicted dry).

(7) Cape Creus. This cape on the Catalan coast of the Mediterranean Sea, near the city of Figueres, where Dali was born. The artist often depicted him in paintings. “Here,” he wrote, “the most important principle of my theory of paranoid metamorphoses is embodied in rocky granite ( the flow of one delusional image into another. - Approx. ed.)... These are frozen clouds reared up by an explosion in all their countless incarnations, all new and new - you just need to slightly change the angle of view.

(8) Sea for Dali it symbolized immortality and eternity. The artist considered it an ideal space for traveling, where time does not flow at an objective speed, but in accordance with internal rhythms traveler's mind.

(9) Egg. According to Nina Getashvili, the World Egg in Dali's work symbolizes life. The artist borrowed his image from the Orphics - ancient Greek mystics. According to Orphic mythology, the first androgynous deity Phanes was born from the World Egg, who created people, and heaven and earth were formed from the two halves of its shell.

(10) Mirror lying horizontally to the left. It is a symbol of variability and inconstancy, obediently reflecting both the subjective and objective world.

Artist

Salvador Dali

The great Spanish artist Salvador Filipe Jacinto Dali i Domenech was born in the spring of 1904, on May 11th at 08:45...

Brief biographical note

1904 Salvador Dali was born on May 11 in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain ( Salvador Dali Domanech).
1910 Dali begins visiting primary school "Immaculate Conception"Christian Brothers.
1916 Summer vacation with the Pichot family. Dali encounters modern painting for the first time.
1917 Spanish artist Nunez teaches Dali the techniques of the original engraving.
1919 First exhibition in a group show in municipal theater in Figueres. Dali is 15 years old.
1921 Death of mother.
1922 Dali passes the entrance exam to the Accademia de San Fernando in Madrid.
1923 Temporary expulsion from the Academy.
1925 First professional solo exhibition at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona.
1926 First trip to Paris and Brussels. Meeting with Picasso. Final expulsion from the Academy.

Leda Atomica 1949

Dream inspired by the flight of a bee 1943

The Last Supper 1955

Temptation of Saint Anthony 1946

Salvador Dali can rightly be called the greatest surrealist. Streams of consciousness, dreams and reality were reflected in all his works. "The Persistence of Memory" is one of the smallest (24x33 cm), but the most discussed paintings. This canvas stands out for its deep subtext and many encrypted symbols. And it is the most copied work of the artist.

Salvador Dali himself said that he created the dials in the picture in two hours. His wife Gala went to the cinema with friends, and the artist stayed at home, referring to headache. Being alone, he examined the room. Here Dali's attention was attracted by Camembert cheese, which he and Gala had recently eaten. It slowly melted in the sun.

Suddenly, the master had an idea, and he went to his studio, where a landscape of the environs of Port Ligat was already painted on canvas. Salvador Dali spread the palette and began to create. By the time the wife arrived home, the picture was ready.

A lot of allusions and metaphors are hidden on a small canvas. Art critics are happy to decipher all the riddles of the Persistence of Memory.

The three clocks represent the present, past and future. Their "melting" form is a symbol of subjective time, unevenly filling space. Another clock with ants crawling on it is linear time that consumes itself. Salvador Dali has repeatedly admitted that in childhood it produced strong impression the sight of ants swarming over a dead bat.

A certain spreading object with eyelashes is a self-portrait of Dali. deserted shore the artist associated with loneliness, and the withered tree - with ancient wisdom. On the left in the picture you can see the mirror surface. It can reflect both reality and the world of dreams.

After 20 years, Dali's view of the world has changed. He created a painting called "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory". In concept, it echoed the Persistence of Memory, however new era technological progress has left its mark on the attitude of the author. The dials are gradually disintegrating, and the space is divided into ordered blocks and flooded with water.

Plot

Dali, like a real surrealist, immerses us in the world of dreams with his painting. Fussy, chaotic, mystical and at the same time seeming understandable and real.

On the one hand, the familiar clock, the sea, the rocky landscape, the withered tree. On the other hand, their appearance and proximity to other, poorly identifiable objects leaves one perplexed.

There are three clocks in the picture: past, present and future. The artist followed the ideas of Heraclitus, who believed that time is measured by the flow of thought. A soft clock is a symbol of non-linear, subjective time, arbitrarily flowing and unevenly filling space.

Dali's molten watch was invented while thinking about Camembert

A hard clock infested with ants is linear time that devours itself. The image of insects as a symbol of decay and decay haunted Dali since childhood, when he saw how insects swarm on the carcass of a bat.

But Dali called the flies the fairies of the Mediterranean: "They carried inspiration to the Greek philosophers who spent their lives under the sun, covered in flies."

The artist depicted himself sleeping in the form of a blurry object with eyelashes. “Sleep is death, or at least it is an exclusion from reality, or, even better, it is the death of reality itself, which dies in the same way during the act of love.”

Salvador Dali

The tree is depicted dry, because, as Dali believed, ancient wisdom (of which this tree is a symbol) has sunk into oblivion.

The deserted shore is the cry of the soul of the artist, who through this image speaks of his emptiness, loneliness and longing. “Here (at Cape Creus in Catalonia - ed.), - he wrote, - the most important principle of my theory of paranoid metamorphoses is embodied in rock granite ... These are frozen clouds reared by an explosion in all their countless guises, more and more - there is only slightly change the angle of view.

At the same time, the sea is a symbol of immortality and eternity. According to Dali, the sea is ideal for traveling, where time flows in accordance with the internal rhythms of consciousness.

Dali took the image of an egg as a symbol of life from the ancient mystics. The latter believed that the first bisexual deity Phanes was born from the World Egg, which created people, and heaven and earth were formed from the two halves of its shell.

A mirror lies horizontally on the left. It reflects everything you want: both the real world and dreams. For Dali, the mirror is a symbol of impermanence.

Context

According to a legend invented by Dali himself, he created the image of a flowing clock in just two hours: “We were supposed to go to the cinema with friends, but at the last moment I decided to stay at home. Gala will go with them, and I'll go to bed early. We ate a lot delicious cheese, then I was left alone, sitting, leaning on the table, and thinking about how “super soft” processed cheese is. I got up and went to the studio to take a look at my work as usual. The picture I was going to paint was a landscape of the outskirts of Port Lligat, rocks, as if illuminated by a dim evening light. In the foreground, I sketched the chopped off trunk of a leafless olive tree. This landscape is the basis for a canvas with some idea, but what? I needed a marvelous image, but I did not find it. I went to turn off the light, and when I got out, I literally “saw” the solution: two pairs of soft clocks, one hanging plaintively from an olive branch. Despite the migraine, I prepared my palette and set to work. Two hours later, when Gala returned from the cinema, the picture, which was to become one of the most famous, was completed.

Gala: no one will be able to forget these soft clocks after seeing them at least once

After 20 years, the picture was built into a new concept - "Disintegration of Memory Persistence". The iconic image is surrounded by nuclear mysticism. Soft dials quietly disintegrate, the world is divided into clear blocks, the space is under water. 1950s with post-war reflection and technical progress, obviously, plowed Dali.

"The Disintegration of Memory Persistence"

Dali is buried in such a way that anyone can walk on his grave

Creating all this diversity, Dali also invented himself - from mustaches to hysterical behavior. He saw how many talented people who were not noticed. Therefore, the artist regularly reminded himself of himself in the most eccentric possible manner.

Dali on the roof of his house in Spain

Even Dali's death was turned into a performance: according to his will, he had to be buried so that people could walk on the grave. Which was done after his death in 1989. Today, Dali's body is buried in the floor in one of the rooms of his house in Figueres.

Dali suffered from paranoia, but without him Dali would not exist as an artist. Dali had bouts of mild delirium, which he could transfer to the canvas. The thoughts that visited Dali during the creation of paintings have always been bizarre. The history of the emergence of one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory, is a vivid example of this.

(1) Soft watch- a symbol of non-linear, subjective time, arbitrarily flowing and unevenly filling space. The three clocks in the picture are past, present and future. “You asked me,” Dali wrote to physicist Ilya Prigogine, “whether I was thinking about Einstein when I was drawing soft clocks (meaning the theory of relativity). I answer you in the negative, the fact is that the connection between space and time was absolutely obvious to me for a long time, so there was nothing special in this picture for me, it was the same as any other ... To this I can add that I thought of Heraclitus (an ancient Greek philosopher who believed that time is measured by the flow of thought). That is why my painting is called The Persistence of Memory. Memory of the relationship of space and time.

(2) Blurred object with eyelashes. This is a self-portrait of a sleeping Dali. The world in the picture is his dream, the death of the objective world, the triumph of the unconscious. “The relationship between sleep, love and death is obvious,” the artist wrote in his autobiography. “Sleep is death, or at least it is an exclusion from reality, or, even better, it is the death of reality itself, which dies in the same way during the act of love.” According to Dali, sleep frees the subconscious, so the artist's head blurs like a clam - this is evidence of his defenselessness. Only Gala, he will say after the death of his wife, “knowing my defenselessness, hid my hermit oyster pulp in a fortress-shell, and thus saved it.”

(3) Solid watchlie on the left with the dial down - this is a symbol of objective time.

(4) Ants- a symbol of decay and decay. According to Nina Getashvili, a professor at the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, “the childhood impression of a wounded bat infested with ants, as well as the artist’s own recollection of a bathing baby with ants in the anus, endowed the artist with the obsessive presence of this insect in his paintings for life.

On the clock on the left, the only one that has retained its hardness, the ants also create a clear cyclic structure, obeying the divisions of the chronometer. However, this does not obscure the meaning that the presence of ants is still a sign of decay.” According to Dali, linear time devours itself.

(5) Fly.According to Nina Getashvili, “the artist called them fairies of the Mediterranean. In The Diary of a Genius, Dali wrote: "They carried inspiration to the Greek philosophers who spent their lives under the sun, covered in flies."

(6) Oliva.For the artist, this is a symbol of ancient wisdom, which, unfortunately, has already sunk into oblivion and therefore the tree is depicted dry.

(7) Cape Creus.This cape on the Catalan coast of the Mediterranean Sea, near the city of Figueres, where Dali was born. The artist often depicted him in paintings. “Here,” he wrote, “the most important principle of my theory of paranoid metamorphoses (the flow of one delusional image into another) is embodied in rock granite. These are frozen clouds reared up by an explosion in all their countless incarnations, all new and new - you just need to slightly change the angle of view.

(8) Seafor Dali it symbolized immortality and eternity. The artist considered it an ideal space for traveling, where time does not flow at an objective speed, but in accordance with the internal rhythms of the traveler's consciousness.

(9) Egg.According to Nina Getashvili, the World Egg in Dali's work symbolizes life. The artist borrowed his image from the Orphics - ancient Greek mystics. According to Orphic mythology, the first androgynous deity Phanes was born from the World Egg, who created people, and heaven and earth were formed from the two halves of its shell.

(10) Mirrorlying horizontally to the left. It is a symbol of variability and inconstancy, obediently reflecting both the subjective and objective world.

Even if you don't know who painted The Persistence of Memory, you've definitely seen it. Soft watches, dry wood, sandy brown colors are recognizable attributes of the canvas of the surrealist Salvador Dali. Date of creation - 1931, painted in oil on canvas self made. Small size - 24x33 cm. Storage location - Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Dali's work is saturated with a challenge to the usual logic, the natural order of things. The artist suffered from a mental disorder of a borderline nature, bouts of paranoid delirium, which was reflected in all his works. The Persistence of Memory is no exception. The picture has become a symbol of variability, the fragility of time, contains hidden meaning, which helps to interpret letters, notes, autobiography of a surrealist.

Dali treated the canvas with special trepidation, investing personal meaning. This attitude towards a miniature work completed in just two hours - important factor, which contributed to its popularity. The laconic Dali, after creating his “Soft Watches”, spoke about them quite often, recalled the history of creation in his autobiography, explained the meaning of the elements in correspondence, records. Art historians who collected references, thanks to this canvas, were able to conduct a deeper analysis of the rest of the works of the famous surrealist.

Description of the picture

The image of melting dials is familiar to everyone, but not everyone will remember the detailed description of Salvador Dali's painting "The Persistence of Memory", and they will not even look closely at some important elements. In this composition, every element, color scheme, and general atmosphere matter.

Painted a picture brown paints with the addition of blue. Transfers to the hot coast - a solid rocky cape is located in the background, by the sea. Near the cape you can see the egg. Closer to the middle plan is a mirror turned upside down with a smooth surface.

In the middle ground is a withered olive tree, from the broken branch of which hangs a flexible clock face. Nearby is the image of the author - a creature blurred like a mollusk with a closed eye and eyelashes. On top of the element is another flexible clock.

The third soft dial hangs from the corner of the surface on which the dry tree grows. In front of him is the only solid clock of the entire composition. They are turned upside down, on the surface of the back there are numerous ants, forming the shape of a chronometer. The picture leaves a lot of empty spaces that do not need to be filled with additional artistic details.

The same image was taken as the basis of the painting "The Decay of the Persistence of Memory", painted in 1952-54. The surrealist added other elements to it - another flexible dial, fish, branches, big amount water. This picture continues, and complements, and contrasts with the first.

History of creation

The history of the creation of Salvador Dali's painting "The Persistence of Memory" is as non-trivial as the entire biography of the surrealist. In the summer of 1931, Dali was in Paris preparing to open personal exhibition works. Waiting for the return from the cinema Gala, his civil wife, which had a huge impact on his work, the artist at the table was thinking about melting cheese. That evening part of their dinner was Camembert cheese, melted under the influence of heat. The surrealist, suffering from a headache, visited the workshop before going to bed, where he worked on a beach landscape bathed in sunset light. In the foreground of the canvas, the skeleton of a dry olive tree was already depicted.

The atmosphere of the picture in the mind of Dali turned out to be consonant with other important images. That evening, he imagined a soft watch hanging from a broken branch of a tree. Work on the painting was continued immediately, despite the evening migraine. Took two hours. When Gala returned, the most famous work Spanish artist was completely completed.

The artist's wife argued that once you see the canvas, how to forget the image will not work. Its creation was facilitated by the changeable shape of the cheese and the theory of the creation of paranoid symbols, which Dalí associates with the view of Cape Creus. This cape wandered from one work of the surrealist to another, symbolizing the inviolability of personal theory.

Later, the artist reworked the idea into a new canvas, called "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory." Water is hanging on a branch here, and the elements are disintegrating. Even dials that are constant in their flexibility slowly melt, and the world is divided into mathematically clear precise blocks.

secret meaning

To understand the secret meaning of the canvas "Permanence of Memory", you will need to look at each attribute of the image separately.

They symbolize non-linear time that fills space with a contradictory flow. For Dali, the connection between time and space was obvious; he did not consider this idea revolutionary. Soft dials are also associated with the ideas of the philosopher of antiquity Heraclitus about the measurement of time by the flow of thought. Dali thought about the Greek thinker and his ideas when creating a picture, which he admitted in a letter to the physicist Ilya Prigogine.

There are three flowing dials. This is a symbol of the past, present and future, mixed into a single space, talking about an obvious relationship.

solid watch

A symbol of the constancy of the flow of time, as opposed to soft hours. They are covered with ants, which the artist associates with decay, death, decay. Ants create the form of a chronometer, obey the structure, never ceasing to symbolize decay. Ants haunted the artist from childhood memories and delusional fantasies, they were obsessively present everywhere. Dali argued that linear time devours itself on its own, he could not do without ants in this concept.

Blurred face with eyelashes

Surrealistic self-portrait of the author, immersed in the viscous world of dreams and the human unconscious. The blurry eye with eyelashes is closed - the artist is sleeping. He is defenseless, in the unconscious nothing holds him down. The shape resembles a mollusk, devoid of a solid skeleton. Salvador said that he was defenseless, like an oyster without a shell, himself. His protective shell was Gala, who had died earlier. The dream was called by the artist the death of reality, so the world of the picture becomes more pessimistic from this.

olive tree

A dry tree with a broken branch is an olive tree. A symbol of antiquity, again reminiscent of the ideas of Heraclitus. The dryness of the tree, the absence of foliage and olives, suggests that the age of ancient wisdom has passed and forgotten, sunk into oblivion.

Other elements

The picture also contains the World Egg, symbolizing life. The image is borrowed from ancient Greek mystics, Orphic mythology. The sea is immortality, eternity, the best space for any travel in the real and imaginary worlds. Cape Creus on the Catalan coast, not far from the author's home, is the embodiment of Dali's theory about the flow of delusional images into other delusional images. The fly on the nearest dial is a Mediterranean fairy that inspired ancient philosophers. The horizontal mirror behind is the impermanence of the subjective and objective worlds.

Color spectrum

Brown sand tones prevail, creating a hot atmosphere. They are contrasted with cold blue shades that soften the pessimistic mood of the composition. The color scheme adjusts to a melancholic mood, becomes the basis for the feeling of sadness that remains after viewing the picture.

General composition

The analysis of the painting "The Persistence of Memory" should be completed by considering the overall composition. Dali is accurate in detail, leaving a sufficient amount of empty space not filled with objects. This allows you to concentrate on the mood of the canvas, find your own meaning, interpret it personally, without "dissecting" every smallest element.

The size of the canvas is small, which indicates the personal significance of the composition for the artist. The whole composition allows you to immerse yourself in inner world the author to better understand his experiences. "Memory Persistence" also known as "Soft Clock" does not require logical parsing. Analyzing this masterpiece of world art in the genre of surrealism, it is required to include associative thinking, a stream of consciousness.