The Persistence of Memory (1931)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Soft melting pocket watches in a coastal landscape; his most famous image
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Art
Salvador Dalí
1904–1989 · Spanish (Catalan)
Surrealism
Salvador Dalí was a Catalan painter and showman who became the most famous figure of Surrealism. His meticulously painted dreamscapes of melting watches, crutches, ants and double images, together with his upturned moustache and flair for publicity, made him a household name across painting, sculpture, film and design.
How to spot them
- ▸Hyper-realistic, highly finished technique applied to impossible dream imagery in vast, empty Catalan landscapes
- ▸Recurring motifs: melting clocks, crutches, ants, elephants on spindly legs, drawers in bodies, eggs
- ▸Double images from his "paranoiac-critical method": one shape reads as two things (swans that reflect as elephants)
- ▸Quiz clue pattern: Figueres, Cadaqués/Port Lligat, his wife Gala, Buñuel, the waxed moustache, Surrealism
Key works
Lobster Telephone (1936)
Tate, London (among several versions)
Surrealist object made for patron Edward James: a plaster lobster on a working telephone
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Monstrous body tearing itself apart, painted months before the Spanish Civil War
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937)
Tate, London
Double image: kneeling Narcissus echoed by a stone hand holding an egg; shown to Freud in 1938
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937)
Private collection
Three swans whose reflections in a lake form elephants
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951)
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
Christ on the cross seen from above over Port Lligat bay; bought by Glasgow in 1952
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Quick-fire facts
- •Dalí was born and died in Figueres, Catalonia, where he created the Dalí Theatre-Museum
- •He co-made the Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (1929) with Luis Buñuel
- •His wife and muse Gala (Elena Ivanovna Diakonova) was previously married to the poet Paul Éluard
- •André Breton mocked him with the anagram "Avida Dollars" and he was effectively expelled from the Surrealist group
- •He nearly suffocated giving a lecture in a diving suit at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London
- •He designed the dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound (1945)
- •He designed the Chupa Chups lollipop logo in 1969
- •He also created the Mae West Lips Sofa for Edward James, based on the actress's lips
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Sources
- National Galleries of Scotland — Salvador Dalí and Edward James, Lobster Telephone
- Freud Museum London — Freud, Dalí and the Metamorphosis of Narcissus
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Salvador Dalí