Surrealist master, painter of the melting clocks
The most famous and most show-loving of the Surrealist painters. With a fine, lifelike realist technique he painted the most absurd of dreams — melting clocks, a burning giraffe, a body with drawers pulled out of it. Deeply influenced by Freud’s theory of the subconscious, he claimed to bring dreams and hallucinations to the canvas by his "paranoiac-critical method." His upturned moustache and eccentric antics made the man himself a walking work of Surrealism.
In The Persistence of Memory, several clocks droop, soft as melting cheese, over branches and a tabletop. Dalí said the inspiration came from a wedge of Camembert melting in the sun. Yet this absurd image speaks a deep truth: in the world of dreams and the subconscious, time is no longer a hard, even measure, but something that can warp, soften, and flow at will.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.