The Persistence of Memory Lyrics

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About

Genius Annotation

“The Persistence of Memory” is a 1931 painting by artist Salvador Dalí, and one of the most recognizable works of surrealism. First shown at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932, since 1934 the painting has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which received it from an anonymous donor. It is widely recognized and frequently referenced in popular culture, and sometimes referred to by more descriptive titles, such as “Melting Clocks”, “The Soft Watches” or “The Melting Watches”. The well-known surrealist piece introduced the image of the soft melting pocket watch. It epitomizes Dalí’s theory of “softness” and “hardness”, which was central to his thinking at the time. As Dawn Adès wrote:

The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order."


This interpretation suggests that Dalí was incorporating an understanding of the world, introduced by Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity. It is possible to recognize a human figure in the middle of the composition, in the strange “monster” that Dalí used in several contemporary pieces to represent himself, the abstract form becoming something of a self-portrait, reappearing frequently in his work. The creature seems to be based on a figure from the Paradise section of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. One can observe that the creature has one closed eye with several eyelashes, suggesting that the creature is also in a dream state.

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Credits
Release Date
January 1, 1931
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