La persistencia de la memoria (1931) or The Persistence of Memory – also known by some as Melting Clocks – is the most famous painting by artist Salvador Dalí.
The painting has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City since 1934. It is very widely recognized, and is a frequent reference in popular culture.
The well-known surrealistic piece introduced the image of the soft melting pocket watch. It epitomizes Dalí'...
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La persistencia de la memoria (1931) or The Persistence of Memory – also known by some as Melting Clocks – is the most famous painting by artist Salvador Dalí.
The painting has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City since 1934. It is very widely recognized, and is a frequent reference in popular culture.
The well-known surrealistic piece introduced the image of the soft melting pocket watch. It epitomizes Dalí's theory of 'softness' and 'hardness', which was central to his thinking at the time. Many also consider that the melting watches were there to literally symbolize the irrelevance of time.
Although fundamentally part of Dalí's Freudian phase, the imagery precedes by 14 years his transition to his scientific phase, which occurred after the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945.
It is possible to recognize a human figure in the middle of the composition, in the strange "monster" that Dalí used in several period pieces to represent himself – the...
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