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The Persistence of Memory

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The Persistence of Memory
The Persistence of Memory
Looking at the picture The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali, people can see an abstract aesthetic deep within. The landscapes associated with his childhood have become an inspiration for his paintings. When he grew up, Dali still spent his time to painting the Catalonia’s landscape elaborately. Completed in 1931, The Persistence of Memory became one of his well-known paintings. This famous artwork is called “Dali ‘s hand painted dream photographs”, and it is simultaneously read as a painting depicting landscape, still life, and self-portrait.
As I find curious in this abstract, I use many researches in reference book and Internet in order to look for the meaning of this picture so far. One interesting idea is about the melting watches that inspire randomly. In one hot August afternoon in 1931, as Dali was having lunch on his work bench, suddenly an idea of paranoiac hallucinations came to his mind. He took his pencil and slid under a bit of Camembert cheese, which was softer by the heating of summer weather, and started drawing. Dali came up with an idea about the melting watches as the main subject. These soft melting watches convey Dali’s primary philosophy about the “softness” and the “hardness”. The melting watches are one symbol that is commonly associated with Salvador Dali's Surrealism. They are literally meant to show the irrelevance of time. According to the Wikipedia website, one famous art history professor named Dawn Ades 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.” In addition, there are some interesting subjects appearing in this painting such as the craggy rocks of Catalonia spreading out further away. This is the place where he grew up, and also indeed the association with his painting The Persistence of Memory. It shows a typical Dalinian landscape with his beloved Cape Creus (a peninsula and

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