That, to Dalí’s own mind, is the wrong question: “I am against any kind of message,” he declared in one of his many television appearances. “A key concept in the Surrealist movement,” metamorphosis is here “exemplified by the paradox of Dalí’s rendering of the hardest and most mechanical objects, watches, into a soft and flaccid form.” Like all of the artist’s best work, it thus “exploits the ambiguity of our perceptual process and plays with our own fears.” But what do the melting clocks mean? Yet “despite its huge cultural impact,” says Payne, the painting is “quite small, about the size of a sheet of paper.” Against the background of “a huge desert landscape with vast depths of field, reduced to a shrunken world” - one harboring references to Goya, De Chirico, and Bosch - it vividly realizes a moment in the process of metamorphosis. The Persistence of Memory doesn’t mark Dalí’s first use of melting clocks, though it’s without doubt his most important. Completed in 1931, this work of art has by now spent about half a century adorning the walls of college dorm rooms, among other spaces inhabited by viewers interested in the alteration of their own perceptive faculties.
In its latest episode Payne takes on the unrelentingly prolific Dalí’s most famous canvas of all, The Persistence of Memory. This is not as drastic an oversimplification as it sounds: after first painting such a counterintuitive image, “Dalí, who knew the importance of branding, would use the melting clocks for his entire career.” So says no less an expert than James Payne, the gallerist and video essayist behind the Youtube channel Great Art Explained.
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