Persistence of Memory Dali, MoMA NY Photo by the Editor
Dali branded himself as the artist as a crazy guy, the large waxed moustache, thought to be modelled on Velasquez’s portrait of Philip IV, was part of his brand.
Dali was no crazy guy, just very clever.
‘The Difference between a madman and me,’ Dali said, ‘is that I am not mad.’
We are going to take a look at one of his most famous works ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (1931).
This tiny painting hangs in MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York. It depicts a strange alien, almost sci-fi, landscape, hung with melting watches and odd creatures.
I had only ever seen large-scale posters of this painting and was surprised by its size (9 1/2 x 13 inches) when I saw it at MoMA. As I stood looking at it I realized that its small size actually helps makes it appear distant and illusory. Somehow, I was relieved it was so small.
This is not a landscape that you feel you could step into, or would even want to. You have no idea what is going on in this place, but you know you are unnerved by it. The longer you look at it the more you half expect to see Dr Who and the Tardis pitch up on the strangely dark beach, the Doctor would not be out-of-place here.
It is like a hauntingly bad dream, held at bay by your conscious self but somewhere in the recesses of your mind, you attempt to keep it distant but somehow it is always sharp and present. Those melting watches appear as a visual code for all really bad times in your life that you would rather forget but can not, or they stand in as a memento mori, reminding us how little time we all have on this strange planet.
The viewer is removed from this landscape and not drawn into it; we are safe to look at it from this distance. The effect of this small painting is quite powerful and haunting in itself. Never mind the lobsters, this is Dali at his best. Even though the work is one of his finest surrealist pieces it has a real quality that we can all understand.
