Salvador Dalí

Private Collection, Spain
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2006

Berlin, Dali - Bilder eines Jahrhundertgenies von 1918 bis 1979, 1998
Andorra, Sala de Exposiciones del Gobierno, Dali Illustrador, 2001
Alicante, Lonja del Pescado & travelling to Valencia, Memoria de los Suenos, 2001-02
Benalmadena, Centro de Esposiciones de Benalmadena, Imagenes, 2002

Executed on a photographic print onto which painted areas and collage elements have been affixed, all laid down on the artist's board, which is floating in the mount. The collage element that comes up above the top of the composition is loose at the top, as per the artist's intentions. There are two artist's pinholes to the upper corners of the board and some associated discolouration. Most of the tears are inherent to the artist's process, but there is one small vertical tear between the five and six marks of the clock that does not appear consistent. There is some unstable paint shrinkage to the thickly applied yellow pigment of the clock and pigment losses on the snail towards the left edge and to places along the extreme left edge. There are two staples towards the left and right lower edges with associated paper loss and traces of rusting. Otherwise this work is in overall good condition. Colours: The colours of the original are fairly accurate when compared with the printed catalogue illustration.
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The primary version of The Persistence of Memory is perhaps Salvador Dalí’s most iconic image and is inextricably linked with the psychological angst and visual incongruities that define Surrealism. Since it was first exhibited at the Galerie Pierre Colle in Paris and later to great fanfare at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932, the motif of the melting clock has become arguaably the artist’s most iconic and most widely referenced in popular culture. As one of the leading members of the Surrealist Group, Dalí never confined his artistic compositions to the limitations of the rational world and often remarked that even he did not have the slightest idea what his own paintings meant. Like the visually-charged works of Pieter Brueghel and Hieronymous Bosch, Dalí’s iconography largely addresses coitus, death and spirituality. In keeping with the Dutch masters who inspired him, Dalí delights in placing his subjects in fantastical settings. 

Rendered with the most extraordinarily exacting attention to detail and imaginative brio, the present work is a beautiful example at Dalí's genius at incorporating a variety of images within a singular composition. Dalí has imbued the present work, executed in 1975, with elements relating to his own lifelong obsession with sex and the passage of time. The base of this work is a sensual photograph of two exotic women in a bath, subjected to and smothered by splashes of white paint added by the artist. The soft watch is collaged above this image on its own sheet which is clearly delineated from the rest of the composition. The clock is dislocated from the other subjects of the work, floating in an unrelated plane. In the dream state, the watch or clock is no longer relevant; our reality has morphed the distortion of time and memories become obfuscated. 

Unlike Albert Einstein, whose explanation of space-time was given in a mathematical equation, the artist responded to questions about the significance of the soft-clock motif by calling for more questions, rather than offering answers: ‘Rest assured, the famous soft watches are nothing but the soft, extravagant, and solitary paranoiac-critical camembert of time and space” (Salvador Dalí, ‘La Conquéte de l’irrationnel’, Éditions surrealists, Paris, 1935; in Haim Finkelstein (ed., trans.), The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, p. 27).