DALART Collection, Dutch Antilles
Collection Ginkobiloka, Barcelona
Collection Theillaumas, Monaco

Work is in very good condition. Executed on white-faced card, verso of card is blue. Craquelure is visbile throughout composition in areas of thickly accumulated pigment. Sheet is extremely fresh and well preserved and colors are very bright and fresh.
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The primary version of The Persistence of Memory (see fig. 1) 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 widely integrated and frequently 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 (see fig. 2) 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. 

Dalí has imbued the present work, executed in 1975, with elements he depicted during his own lifelong obsession with sex and the fleeting passage of time. With the bravura of an Old Master draftsman, Dalí delineates with great flourish the figures flanking the limp timepiece. Sensuously rendered, Venus stands at left holding a mirror,🍸 an attribute for꧃ vanity and lust.  She is self-absorbed and seemingly unaware that she is entangled in Vulcan’s net. At right sits an angel, a divine messenger of life and death, in contemplation before the keeper of time in our waking state. In the dream state, however, 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 than the desired answer, “Rest assured, the famous soft clocks are merely the soft, crazy, lonely, paranoid-critical Camembert of time and space” (Dalí, Conquest of the Irrational, New York, 1935).

The title of the work relates to Gala’s response when Dalí asked her whether in three years time she would have forgotten the painting. She replied, “no one can forget it once he has seen it” (Paul Moorhouse, Dalí, London, 1990, p. 49).