
The painting gives you sense that you are dreaming and that time is irrelevant. Perhaps the most famous of all the great Surrealist paintings, the Persistence of Memory is known for the melting watches as well as the clarity of the art. The Persistence of Memory (Salvador Dali) De Chirico was trying to explain his feelings for the ridiculousness of World War I through this painting. It combines a number of unrelated objects such as the green ball, giant rubber glove, and the head of a Greek statue. It was painted by de Chirico in 1914, before the movement really began. This painting is one of the earliest examples of Surrealist art. The artwork often made little sense as it was usually trying to depict a dream or random thoughts. Surrealism images explored the subconscious areas of the mind.

What are the characteristics of Surrealism? The movement began in the mid-1920s in France and was born out of an earlier movement called Dadaism from Switzerland. The movement included many artists, poets, and writers who expressed their theories in their work. The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory is now in Florida’s Salvador Dalí Museum.Surrealism began as a philosophical movement that said the way to find truth in the world was through the subconscious mind and dreams, rather than through logical thought. The painting represents a farewell to Dali’s interest in surrealism as he turned more and more to the contradictions and strangeness of nuclear physics.

The painting was allegedly inspired by Dali’s fascination with nuclear physics, and in its own way depicts the quantum world, where things both come together and come apart at the same moment and flicker in and out of existence. A fish seems to hold up the reflection of the cliffs as it swims, unconcerned, through the water. Yet another melted watch has sunk beneath the layer of bricks, leaving bits of detritus behind. The stem and twigs, though severed from each other, float in space as if they are still connected.īeneath the surface of the water, another watch is coming to pieces over a bleached version of the creature seen in The Persistence of Memory. Some bricks furl up into darts that seem to bedevil a melting watch that is beneath the water and the melting watch that hangs from a twig of the branch in the foreground.

This wall in turn begins to disintegrate as it spreads leftward. The bottom half of the picture is dominated by bricks that float in orderly rows both under and over the water and form a sort of mortarless wall on the left side of the painting. The water is clear and calm enough to mirror the cliffs in the distance, even as it bisects the one jutting rock in its center.
The persistence of memory meaning face skin#
In this painting, the arid landscape of The Persistence of Memory has been flooded, even though the skin of the water is snagged by the leafless branch in the background. If anything, it’s even more fascinating and mysterious than The Persistence of Memory. This oil on canvas painting, created in 1954, is only 10 by 13 inches, only slightly larger than a sheet of legal sized paper.

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory is the companion of The Persistence of Memory, the painting that everyone knows with its pocket watches melting away in a wasteland. The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, 1959 The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1952-1954 The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory
