Question

Analyze the painting entitled The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali. Use the guide questions below: 1. What is the message? 2. What is the purpose of the message? 3. How is the message conveyed by the text and/or image? 4. Who is the target audience of the message? 5. What other ways of presenting the message are there?

Answer 1

When Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory, his artistic practice was guided by the peculiar “paranoiac-critical method.” Developed by the artist in 1930, the technique relies on self-induced paranoia and hallucinations to facilitate a work of art.

Salvador Dali Clocks Meaning and Dreams

If Persistence of Memory depicts a dream state, the melting and distorted clocks symbolize the erratic and unreliable passage of time that we experience while dreaming.

Salvador Dali Clocks Meaning and Dreams

The distorted clocks don't have any power or importance in the dream world and because of that are melting away. InPersistence of Memory, Salvador Daliillustrates how useless, irrelevant, and arbitrary our obsession with time is, inside and outside of the dream state.

Dalí frequently described his works as “hand-painted dream photographs.” He applied the methods of Surrealism, tapping deep into the non-rational mechanisms of his mind—dreams, the imagination, and the subconscious—to generate the unreal forms that populate The Persistence of Memory.