Name: Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931
Uploaded: 2017-01-25T19:44:03.000Z
Duration: 6 min 28 s
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Steven: At the Museum of Modern Art there is this tiny painting by Salvador Dali,

which is the painting that everybody wants to see.

That and Starry Night by Van Gogh are the two stars.

We thought it would be really interesting to talk about why this painting is so wildly popular.

This is the Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali.

Sal: And here I understand why people kind of connect to it now.

I mean anybody who has ever tried to make an album

for a rock band is inspired by Salvador Dali.

There is also this kind of fun of, "What are you looking at?"

Is it on album cover art because it's this attack on the rational and that's such a seductive idea?

I like the way you put it. It's an attack on the rational.

I guess I don't ... There might be more to it. That's my sense.

Steven: You know, you were talking about album cover art and posters in maybe a dorm room.

What's interesting is that these artists took these ideas really seriously.

This was Surrealism. This was painted in 1931.

Dali, the Spanish artist, this Catalin Artist,

had just come to Paris and had joined the Surrealist group.

Sal: I'm assuming he's considered significant because he was the first person

to essentially do dreamscapes, and as you mentioned, attack on the rational.

Steven: When you walk into this painting visually, you enter into this really deep

open and lonely space, and is this really quiet image.

Sal: Yeah it's kind of this desert-scape, ignoring the melting clocks for a moment,

you feel that okay if you were in this landscape, yes, time really does not really

carry a lot of weight. You could just kind of wither there and die and no one would care.

Even that kind of water in the background.

It's like they've had time to settle down.

Steven: There's this unbearable sense of quiet.

There is almost no movement and I think it does feel very desert-like, very hot.

We do have this very naturalistic rendering

but it's growing out of something that seems clearly man-made or at least geometric,

You have ants that seem to be eating and attracted

to a piece of metal as opposed to a piece of rotted flesh.

Sal: Oh that's what that is. I couldn't fully make it out.

Okay so they're eating away at a time piece. That's fascinating.

Steven: And of course you have the drooping clocks.

And that's such an interesting and provocative idea

because time is something that is so regimented.

Time is something that rules us, that is so associated with the industrial culture that we live in,

And even the way the light is set up, especially on the cliff,

it looks like it's sunset so it's kind of like,

Steven: Now there are some identifiable things.

For all the absurdity and for all of the impossibility

of what we're seeing, there are some things that our historians have recognized.

The cliffs in the back are, we think, the cliffs of the Catalonian coast in Northern Spain

where Dali is from and so this is his childhood perhaps.

Some art historians have concluded that that strange figure, almost a profile face.

Can you make out an eye with extremely long lashes and perhaps a tongue under the nose?

Sal: This is the whole optical illusion part of Dali.

Yeah I thought it was a blanket but now I completely see the eyelashes.

I thought it was a duck for a second too.

I see the eyelashes and the top of a nose.

Steven: Yeah, Dali does that fun thing where one object can actually be several things at once,

Some art historians think this is his face but elusive and very much a kind of dream.

Sal: That goes back in the category of is this more that kind of dorm room optical

Surrealism positive to that, the rational world that we have so much faith in,

was perhaps not worthy of all that faith.

but was something that we had sublimated.

Something that we had tried to drive out of our life.

And the way that these artists and writers thought about it

was if only they could retrieve the world of the dream.

Some of them had only heard sort of secondhand accounts of Freud.

where the irrational mind came to the fore unrestricted.

Sal: This is something that often confronts me.

Even the notions that how we perceive what we think

is objective reality is really based on how our brain is wired.

We see linear time. This is how humans are wired.

I think that's what's fun about these type of things.

Look, there are different forms of reality and who are we as creatures that are wired

one particular way to be all that judgmental about what's real.

Steven: When people have looked at this painting they have sometimes,

I think unconvincingly, tried to link it to fine signs earlier,

Steven: Exactly and time in fact was not a strict thing.

I think there is more evidence that Dali is thinking about,

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931

literally

perceive

assume

illusion