Die Beständigkeit der Erinnerung

Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931)—known in German as Die Beständigkeit der Erinnerung—compresses an oneiric landscape into a cabinet-sized canvas just 24 × 33 cm. Across a sun-bleached shore (modeled on Catalonia’s Cap de Creus), pocket watches slump and ooze, their limp forms turning the authority of clock-time into satire. Dalí made the picture at the height of Surrealism, employing his “paranoiac-critical method” to mine hallucinatory imagery; he later joked that the drooping watches were sparked by a vision of melting Camembert. The pallid, mask-like profile at center—part creature, part self-portrait—breathes with dream logic, binding memory, desire, and decay into a single, unforgettable emblem of modern art. Oil on canvas, 24.1 × 33 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of an anonymous donor, 1934.