The Persistence of Memory hidden symbols

The Persistence of Memory hidden symbols
In early August 1929 a young Dali met his future wife and muse Gala. Their union was the key to the incredible success of the artist, and influenced all his subsequent work, including his iconic painting “The Persistence of Memory.” Salvador Dali painted it in 1931. Since 1934 “The Persistence of Memory” has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

(1) Flexible hours – a symbol of the non-linear, subjective time, arbitrarily current and uneven filling the space. Three clocks in the picture – past, present and future. Dali admitted he thought about Einstein when drawing soft watches (meaning the theory of relativity).

(2) Shapeless object with eyelashes. This is a self-portrait of sleeping Dali. World in the picture – his dream, death of the objective world, the triumph of the unconscious. “The relationship between sleep, love and death is obvious – the artist wrote in his autobiography. – Dream is death, or at least an absence from the reality, or, even better, the death of reality itself, which is exactly the same dying during the act of love”. It is a testament to his insecurity. Gala only, he would say after the death of his wife, “knowing my helplessness, hid my hermit oyster flesh in a fortress-shell, and with that has saved me.”

(3) Solid-clock dial on the left lies down – a symbol of objective time.

(4) Ants – a symbol of decay and decomposition. Left on the clock, the only surviving hardness, ants also provide a clear cyclic structure obeying to the divisions of chronometer. However, this does not obscure the meaning that the presence of ants at the same time – a sign of decomposition. According to Dali, linear time devours itself.

(5) The fly. The artist referred to them as Mediterranean fairies. In “Diary of a Genius” Dali wrote: “They brought inspiration to the Greek philosophers, who spent their lives under the sun, plastered with flies.”

(6) Olive. For the artist, it is a symbol of ancient wisdom, which, unfortunately, have sunk into oblivion (as it is shown in dry tree).

(7) Cape Creus. This cape on the Catalan Mediterranean coast, near the town of Figueres, where Dali was born. He often portrayed it in pictures. “Here, – he wrote – in rocky granite overriding principle embodied my paranoid theory of metamorphosis (delusional flowing from one image to another). It’s frozen, rearing with explosion cloud in all its countless guises, all new and new – if only slightly change the angle of view. ”

(8) Sea – Dali symbolized immortality and eternity. The artist considered it an ideal space for travel, where time flows not with an objective rate, but in accordance with the internal rhythms of consciousness traveler.

(9) Egg. Mundane Egg in the works of Dali symbolizes life. The artist borrowed this image from the Orphic – Greek mystics. According to the mythology from the Orphic Mundane Egg was born first androgynous deity Fanes, created the people, and the two halves of its shell formed heaven and earth.

The Persistence of Memory hidden symbols

(10) Mirror, lying horizontally on the left. It is a symbol of impermanence and changeability obediently reflecting both subjective and objective world.

vokrugsveta.ru