In early August 1929, young Dali met his future wife and muse Gala. Their union became the key to the artist's incredible success, influencing all his subsequent work, including the painting "The Persistence of Memory".
Salvador Dali and Gala in Cadaques. 1930 year. Photo: courtesy of the Pushkin Museum. A.S. Pushkin
History of creation
They say that Dali was slightly out of his mind. Yes, he suffered from paranoid syndrome. But without this there would be no Dali as an artist. He had a slight delirium, which was expressed in the appearance in the mind of dreaming education, which 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 of Modern Art).
It was in the summer of 1931 in Paris, when Dali was preparing for a personal exhibition. After seeing his common-law wife Gala with friends to the cinema, “I,” writes Dali in his memoirs, “returned to the table (we finished dinner with an excellent Camembert) and plunged into thoughts about the spreading pulp. Cheese appeared in 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 frame 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 which one? 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 left, I literally saw the solution: two pairs of soft watches, they plaintively hang from an olive branch. Despite the migraine, I prepared a palette and got to work. Two hours later, by the time Gala returned, the most famous of my paintings was finished. "
(1) Soft watch - a symbol of nonlinear, subjective time, arbitrarily current and unevenly filling space. Three hours in the picture are past, present and future. “You asked me,” Dali wrote to physicist Ilya Prigogine, “did I think about Einstein when I drew soft clocks ( i mean the theory of relativity. - Approx. ed.). I answer you in the negative, the fact is that the connection between space and time has long been absolutely obvious to me, so there was nothing special in this picture for me, it was the same as any other ... To this I can add that I am a lot thought about Heraclitus ( an ancient Greek philosopher who believed that time was measured by the flow of thought. - Approx. ed.). That is why my painting is called The Persistence of Memory. Memory of the relationship between space and time. "
(2) Blurred object with eyelashes. This is a self-portrait of 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. "A dream is death, or at least it is an exception from reality, or, even better, it is the death of reality itself, which dies in the same way during a love act." According to Dali, sleep frees the subconscious, so the artist's head spreads like a mollusk - this is evidence of his defenselessness. Only Gala, he will say after the death of his wife, “knowing my defenselessness, hid my hermit's 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 putrefaction and decay. According to Nina Getashvili, professor at the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, “the childhood impression of a wounded bat teeming with ants, as well as the artist's own memory of a baby bathed with ants in the anus, endowed the artist with the intrusive presence of this insect in his painting. ( "I loved to recall nostalgically this action, which in fact did not exist," the artist writes in "The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, Told by Himself." - Approx. ed.). On the clock on the left, the only one to retain its hardness, the ants also create a clear cyclical 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 the fairies of the Mediterranean. In The Diary of a Genius, Dali wrote: "They carried inspiration to the Greek philosophers who lived their lives under the sun, covered with flies."
(6) Olive. For the artist, this is a symbol of ancient wisdom, which, unfortunately, has already sunk into oblivion (therefore, the tree is depicted as dry).
(7) Cape Creus. This promontory on the Catalan Mediterranean coast, near the town 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 rock granite ( flow of one delusional image into another. - Approx. ed.) ... These are frozen clouds reared by the explosion in all their countless forms, more and more 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 travel space, where time does not flow at an objective speed, but in accordance with the inner 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 Orphic - ancient Greek mystics. According to Orphic mythology, the first bisexual deity Phanes was born from the World Egg, who created people, and heaven and earth were formed from the two halves of his shell.
(10) Mirrorlying horizontally to the left. It is a symbol of changeability and impermanence, obediently reflecting both the subjective and the objective world.
Painter
Salvador Dali
The great Spanish artist Salvador Filipe Jacinto Dali and Domenech was born in the spring of 1904, on May 11 at 08:45 ...
Brief biographical note
1904 Salvador Dali Domanech is born on May 11th in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain.
1910 Dali begins attending Christian Brothers' Immaculate Conception primary school.
1916 Summer vacation with the Pichot family. Dali first encounters contemporary painting.
1917 Spanish artist Nunez teaches Dalí the techniques of original engraving.
1919 First exhibition in a group show at the Municipal Theater in Figueres. Dali - 15 years old.
1921 Mother's death.
1922 Dali passes the entrance examination at 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 exclusion from the Academy.
Leda Atomica 1949Dream inspired by the flight of a bee 1943
Last Supper 1955
The Temptation of Saint Anthony 1946
1929 Collaboration with Louis Bunuel in the production of the film "Andalusian Dog". Meeting with Gala Eluard. First exhibition in Paris.
1930 Dali resides with Gala in Port Ligat, Spain.
1931 Painting "Persistence of Memory".
1934 The painting "The Enigma of Wilhelm Tell" quarrels Dali with a group of surrealists. Civil marriage with Gala. Drive to New York. Albert Skira publishes 42 original prints by Dali.
1936 Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Pictures "Autumn of cannibalism", "Soft hours", "Civil war warning".
1938 Conversation with the sick Sigmund Freud in London. Dali takes part in the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris.
1939 Ultimately expelled from the Surrealist group due to Dali's unwillingness to support their political motives.
1940 Dali and Gala emigrate to America where they live for eight years, first in Virginia, then in California and New York.
1941 Retrospective exhibition with Miro at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
1942 Publication of his autobiography "The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, Telling Himself".
1946 Participation in the project of the film "Destino" by Walt Disney. Participation in the Alfred Hitchcock film project. Painting "The Temptation of St. Anthony".
1949 Paintings "Leda Atomica" and Madonna of Port Ligat "(version 1). Return to Europe.
1957 Publication of twelve original lithographs by Dali entitled "Pages of the Quest of Don Quixote from La Mancha".
1958 Gala and Dali wedding in Girona, Spain.
1959 Painting "Discovery of America by Columbus".
1962 Dali enters into a ten-year agreement with publisher Pierre Arguille to publish illustrations ./\u003e
1965 Dali signs a contract with Sidney Lucas, New York.
1967 Acquisition of the Pubol castle in Girona and its reconstruction.
1969 Inauguration of the Pubol Castle.
1971 Opening of the Salvador Dali Museum in Cleveland, Ohio.
1974 Dali begins to worry about health problems.
1982 Opening of the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. Death of Gal at Pubol Castle.
1983 Grandiose exhibition of Dali's works in Spain, Madrid and Barcelona. Completion of painting classes. The last painting is "Swallow's Tail".
1989 On January 23, Dali died of heart failure. He is buried in the crypt of the Tatro Museum in Figueres, Spain.
S. Dali, Persistence of Memory, 1931.
The most famous and most talked about among artists, Salvador Dali's painting has been in the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1934.
This painting depicts a clock as a symbol of the human experience of time, memory, and is shown here in great distortions, such as our memories sometimes are. Dali has not forgotten himself, he is also present in the form of a sleeping head, which appears in his other paintings. During this period, Dali constantly displayed the image of a deserted coast, by this he expressed the emptiness within himself.
This void was filled when he saw a piece of Kemember cheese. "... Deciding to write a watch, I wrote it soft. It was one evening, I was tired, I had a migraine - an extremely rare ailment for me. We had 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 delicious cheese, then I was left alone, sitting with my elbows on the table, thinking about how "super soft" processed cheese is.
I got up and went to the workshop to take a look at my work as usual. The picture I was about to paint was a landscape of the outskirts of Port Lligat, rocks, as if illuminated by a dim evening light.
In the foreground, I have sketched the severed trunk of a leafless olive. This landscape is the basis for a canvas with some idea, but which one? I needed a marvelous image, but I did not find it.
I went to turn off the light, and when I left, I literally "saw" the solution: two pairs of soft watches, one piteously hanging from an olive branch. Despite the migraine, I prepared a palette and got to work.
Two hours later, when Gala returned from the cinema, the picture, which was to become one of the most famous, was finished.
The painting has become a symbol of the modern concept of the relativity of time. A year after the exhibition in the Parisian gallery of Pierre Colet, the painting was bought by the New York Museum of Modern Art.
In the painting, the artist expressed the relativity of time and emphasized the amazing property of human memory, which allows us to travel back to those days that have long been in the past.
HIDDEN SYMBOLS
Soft clock on the table
The symbol of nonlinear, subjective time, arbitrarily current and unevenly filling space. Three hours in the picture are past, present and future.
Blurred object with eyelashes.
This is a self-portrait of 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. "A dream is death, or at least it is an exception from reality, or, even better, it is the death of reality itself, which dies in the same way during a love act." According to Dali, sleep frees the subconscious, so the artist's head spreads like a mollusk - this is evidence of his defenselessness.
Solid watch lying on the left with the dial facing down. Objective time symbol.
Ants are a symbol of putrefaction and decay. According to Nina Getashvili, professor at the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, “the childhood impression of a bat is a wounded animal infested with ants.
Fly. According to Nina Getashvili, “the artist called them the 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 with flies."
Olive.
For the artist, this is a symbol of ancient wisdom, which, unfortunately, has already sunk into oblivion (therefore, the tree is depicted as dry).
Cape Creus.
This promontory on the Catalan Mediterranean coast, near the town 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 overflow of one delusional image into another. - Ed.) Is embodied in rock granite ... These are frozen clouds reared by the explosion in all their countless hypostases, all new and new - you just need to slightly change the angle of view. "
For Dali, the sea symbolized immortality and eternity. The artist considered it an ideal travel space, where time does not flow at an objective speed, but in accordance with the inner rhythms of the traveler's consciousness.
Egg.
According to Nina Getashvili, the World Egg in Dali's work symbolizes life. The artist borrowed his image from the Orphic - ancient Greek mystics. According to Orphic mythology, the first bisexual deity Phanes was born from the World Egg, who created people, and heaven and earth were formed from the two halves of his shell.
Mirror lying horizontally to the left. It is a symbol of changeability and impermanence, obediently reflecting both the subjective and the objective world.
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Reviews
We have to regret that Salvador Dali did not paint, but only painted objects like a photograph, although he gives this explanation why he did exactly that in his "Diary of a Genius", but this work can hardly be attributed to successful, it costs exactly as much as she spent mental effort. A large dark, simply shaded field creates an undesirable effect of being unoccupied and even a lying head does not give an impetus to comprehend the essence of the plan. It is a good thing to use dreams in works, as he did, but it does not always lead to brilliant results.
My attitude to creativity was ambiguous. One time I visited his homeland in Figueres, Spain. There is a large museum that he created himself, many of his works. It impressed me. Later I read his biography, reviewed his work and wrote several articles about his work.
This kind of painting is not to my liking, but it is interesting. So I just perceive his work as a special phenomenon in painting.
We must assume that he, like any artist, has different works: those that are flagship and just ordinary ones. If by the first we judge the pinnacle of mastery, then the others are essentially routine work and you cannot do without it. Perhaps a dozen works by Dali are just those with which you can enter the top ten most-most in the world in the section of surrealism. To many, he is an example and inspirer of this direction.
What amazes me in his works is not skill, but imagination. Some paintings are simply repulsive, but it is interesting to understand what he wanted to say. There is one composition with lips in the museum, something similar to theatrical scenery. Click here to see the museum. and some work. By the way, he is buried in this museum.
Salvador Dali can rightfully be called the greatest surrealist. Streams of consciousness, dreams and reality were reflected in all of his works. The Persistence of Memory is one of the smallest (24x33 cm), but the most talked about paintings. This canvas stands out with deep subtext and many encrypted symbols. It is also the most copied work of the artist.
Salvador Dali himself said that he created the dials in the painting in two hours. His wife Gala went to the cinema with friends, and the artist stayed at home, citing a headache. Alone, he scanned the room. Here Dali's attention was drawn to the Camembert cheese, which he and Gala recently ate. He slowly melted in the sun.
Suddenly the master came up with an idea, and he went to his studio, where the landscape of the surroundings 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.
The small canvas contains many allusions and metaphors. 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 the space. Another watch with ants swarming on it is linear time that absorbs itself. Salvador Dali has repeatedly admitted that in childhood he was deeply impressed by the sight of ants swarming on a dead bat.
A kind of flowing object with eyelashes is Dali's self-portrait. The artist associated a deserted coast with loneliness, and a dry 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 "Disintegration of the persistence of memory." According to the concept, it echoed the "Persistence of Memory", but the new era of technical progress left its mark on the author's attitude. The dials gradually disintegrate, and the space is divided into ordered blocks and flooded with water.
Salvador Dali. The Persistence of Memory. 1931 24x33 cm.Museum of Modern Art, New York (MOMA)
The melting clock is a very recognizable image of Dali. Even more recognizable than an egg or a nose with lips.
Remembering Dali, we, willy-nilly, think about the painting "The Persistence of Memory".
What is the secret of such a success of the picture? Why did it become the artist's calling card?
Let's try to figure it out. And at the same time, we will closely consider all the details.
"Persistence of memory" - there is something to think about
Salvador Dali's many works are unique. Due to the unusual combination of details. This encourages the viewer to ask questions. What is it all about? What did the artist want to say?
Memory persistence is no exception. She immediately provokes a person to think. Because the image of the current clock is very catchy.
But not only the watch makes you think. The whole picture is saturated with many contradictions.
Let's start with color. There are many brown shades in the picture. They are hot, which enhances the feeling of desolation.
But this hot space is diluted with cold blue. Such are the dials of watches, the sea and the surface of a huge mirror.
Salvador Dali. Persistence of memory (fragment with a dry tree). 1931 Museum of Modern Art, New York
The curvature of the dials and dry wood branches are in clear contrast to the straight lines of the table and mirror.
We also see the opposition of real and unreal things. A dry tree is real, but a clock melting on it is not. The sea in the distance is real. But a mirror with its size in our world is unlikely to be found.
Such a mixture of everything and everything leads to different thoughts. I also think about the volatility of the world. And about the fact that time does not come, but goes away. And about the proximity of reality and sleep in our life.
Everyone will think about it, even if he knows nothing about Dali's work.
Dali's interpretation
Dali himself did little to comment on his masterpiece. He just said that the image of a melting clock was inspired by cheese spreading in the sun. And when painting the picture, he thought about the teachings of Heraclitus.
This ancient thinker spoke of the fact that everything in the world is changeable and has a dual nature. Well, there is more than enough duality in The Constancy of Time.
But why exactly did the artist name his painting? Maybe because he believed in the persistence of memory. The fact that only the memory of some events and people can be preserved, despite the passage of time.
But we do not know the exact answer. All the beauty of a masterpiece is in this. You can struggle as long as you like over the riddles of the picture, but you still cannot find all the answers.
On that day in July 1931, Dali had an interesting image of a melting clock in his head. But all the other images have already been used by him in other works. They migrated to the "Persistence of Memory".
Maybe that's why the painting is so successful. Because this is a piggy bank of the artist's most successful images.
They even drew their favorite egg. Although somewhere in the background.
Salvador Dali. Memory persistence (fragment). 1931 Museum of Modern Art, New York Of course, on "Geopolitical Child" it is a close-up. But both there and there the egg bears the same symbolism - change, the birth of something new. Again according to Heraclitus.
Salvador Dali. Geopolitical child. 1943 Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA In the same fragment of "The Persistence of Memory", a close-up view of the mountains. This is Cape Creus near his hometown of Figueres. Dali loved to transfer childhood memories to his paintings. So this landscape, familiar to him from birth, wanders from picture to picture.
Dali's self-portrait
Of course, a strange creature still catches the eye. It, like a clock, is fluid and formless. This is Dali's self-portrait.
We see a closed eye with huge eyelashes. A protruding long and thick tongue. He is clearly unconscious or not feeling well. Still, in this heat, when even the metal melts.
Salvador Dali. Persistence of memory (detail with self-portrait). 1931 Museum of Modern Art, New York Is this a metaphor for wasted time? Or a human shell that spent its life senselessly?
Personally, I associate this head with Michelangelo's self-portrait from the Last Judgment fresco. The master portrayed himself in a peculiar way. In the form of a deflated skin.
To take a similar image is quite in the spirit of Dali. After all, his work was distinguished by frankness, a desire to show all his fears and desires. The image of a man with flayed skin suited him well.
Michelangelo. The Last Judgment. Fragment. 1537-1541 Sistine Chapel, Vatican In general, such a self-portrait is a frequent occurrence in Dali's paintings. Close-up we see him on the canvas "The Great Masturbator".
Salvador Dali. Great masturbator. 1929 Reina Sofia Center for the Arts, Madrid And now we can already draw a conclusion about another secret of the success of the picture. All the pictures given for comparison have one feature. Like many other works by Dali.
Spicy details
There is a lot of sexual connotation in Dali's works. You cannot easily show them to audiences under the age of 16. And you cannot portray them on posters either. Otherwise they will be accused of offending the feelings of passers-by. How it happened with the reproductions.
But "Persistence of Memory" is quite innocent. Replicate as much as you want. And show in art classes in schools. And print on mugs with T-shirts.
It is difficult not to pay attention to insects. A fly sits on one dial. On an inverted red clock - ants.
Salvador Dali. Memory persistence (detail). 1931 Museum of Modern Art, New York Ants are also frequent guests in the master's paintings. We see them on the same "Masturbator". They swarm in locusts and around the mouth.
Salvador Dali became famous all over the world thanks to his inimitable surreal style of painting. The most famous works of the author include his personal self-portrait, where he portrayed himself with a neck in the style of Raphael, "Flesh on stones", "Enlightened pleasures", "The Invisible Man". However, "The Persistence of Memory" Salvador Dali wrote, adding this work to one of his deepest theories. This happened at the junction of his stylistic rethinking, when the artist joined the current of surrealism.
"The Persistence of Memory". Salvador Dali and his Freudian theory
The famous canvas was created in 1931, when the artist is in a state of heightened excitement from the theories of his idol, the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. In general terms, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe picture was supposed to convey the artist's attitude to softness and rigidity.
Being a very egocentric person, prone to outbursts of uncontrollable inspiration and at the same time thoroughly interpreting it from the point of view of psychoanalysis, Salvador Dali, like all creative personalities, created his masterpiece under the influence of a hot summer day. As the artist himself recalls, he was puzzled by the contemplation of how he melted from the heat and was previously attracted by the theme of the transformation of objects into different states, which he tried to convey on canvas. The painting "Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali is a symbiosis of melted cheese with an olive standing alone against the backdrop of mountains. By the way, this very image became the prototype of soft watches.
Description of the picture
Almost all the works of that period are filled with abstract images of human faces hidden behind the shapes of foreign objects. They seem to be hiding from sight, but at the same time they are the main characters. So the surrealist tried to portray the subconscious in his works. The central figure of the canvas "Persistence of Memory" Salvador Dali made a face that is similar to his self-portrait.
The painting seemed to have absorbed all the significant stages in the artist's life, and also reflected the inevitable future. You can see that in the lower left corner of the canvas, you can see a closed clock covered with ants. Dali often resorted to the image of these insects, which for him were associated with death. The shape and color of the clock were based on the artist's memories of those broken in his childhood home. By the way, the mountains that can be seen are nothing more than a piece from the landscape of the Spaniard's homeland.
"The constancy of memory" Salvador Dali portrayed somewhat devastated. It is clearly seen that all objects are separated by a desert and are not self-sufficient. Art critics believe that by this the author was trying to convey his spiritual emptiness, which weighed down on him at that time. In fact, the idea was to convey the human anguish over the passage of time and changes in memory. Time, according to Dali, is infinite, relative and in constant motion. Memory, on the other hand, is short-lived, but its stability should not be underestimated.
Secret images in the picture
“The Persistence of Memory” Salvador Dali wrote in a couple of hours and did not bother to explain to anyone what he wanted to say with this canvas. Many art critics still build hypotheses around this iconic work of the master, noticing in it only individual symbols, to which the artist resorted throughout his
Upon closer inspection, you can see that the clock hanging from the branch on the left is similar in shape to the tongue. The tree on the canvas is depicted as withered, indicating the destructive aspect of time. This work is small in size, but it is considered the most powerful of all that Salvador Dali wrote. "The constancy of memory" is undoubtedly the most psychologically profound picture, which reveals the author's inner world to the maximum. Perhaps that is why he did not want to comment on it, leaving his admirers in conjecture.