Salvador Dali:

The Disintegration of Persistence of Memory

1952-1954

Dali's interest in so called soft watches makes him the Time painter by excel. He creates surrealist landscapes where time is not what it was anymore. With the soft watches he expresses the distorted timesense of modern man. They are like the acid dreams of a drug addict: we are not in the reality. We should realize this. These paintings are highly moralistic in fact. Dali is lecturing on the unreal and wants us to know that it has something to do with the distortion of clocktime relating to the landscape or the natural time as we had it for thousands of years. He shows we can live with that distortion and see the beauty of it, but it is also a warning: we lose touch with reality, our memory is disintegrating. Before it was a persistence of memory, now we more mathematically and onesided linear ran into disintegration.

This work is a later version of the wellknown The Persistence of Memory, 1931

Dali's collected works: Dali Gallery