This painting's not a dream, but it's too good to omit. Dali had experimented for a few years with turning hard things soft--the year before, in Premature Ossification of a Railway Station he'd even put a melting clock on the wall; but it was peripheral. In Persistence, he had an eerily beautiful beach with sunset shadows, and the jellyfish/horse/fetus/face he used for himself as a dreamer... but it lacked a center.

It came in a flash--three drooping watches (plus one overripe and ant-infested), to show viscerally and literally the relativistic melting of time. Two hours later it was done.

Nearly a century later, it still defines Dalí. The persistence of cultural memory...

SOURCE: Salvador Dalí by Eric Shanes, (2014), pp 92-3.

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