Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory

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Salvador Dali claims to have painted “The Persistence of Memory” in 1931 after seeing some Camembert cheese melting in the heat on a hot summer day. Later that night, he dreamt of clocks melting on a landscape.  This is mentioned by Dali himself in his book  Diary of a Genius. However,  Dali was known to make up peculiar explanations for his paintings to purposely mislead people.  He did this to stimulate discussion of his art that allowed for multiple interpretations.  It also made criticizing his work nearly impossible for people he thought were less intelligent than himself.  Other interpretations of the painting posit that the painting is a “meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order” relating to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, as well as Freud‘s theories of the “unconscious mind”.

(Daily Art FixxAuthentic Society)