The Persistence of Memory (Salvador Dali)

The Persistence of Memory, also known as Soft Watches or Melting Clocks, is one of Dalí’s most famous pieces. Salvador Dali was a Catalan Spanish artist who became one of the most important painters of the 20th century. Several of his favorite recurring images are present in this work. The setting is one he often used: the seashore of Catalonia at Cape Creus. His melting-clock imagery mocks the rigidity of chronometric time. The watches themselves look like soft cheese—indeed, by Dalí’s own account they were inspired by hallucinations after eating Camembert cheese. (He used a process he called the “paranoiac critical method,”: he deliberately provoked hallucinations as a path to his own subconscious.)  In the center of the picture, under one of the watches, is a distorted human face in profile, an image that also appears in his earlier work The Great Masturbator (1929). The ants on the plate represent decay.