Time and Change in 10 Salvador Dalí Paintings

By far the most popular Surrealism painting in the world, even though by then Salvador Dali wasn’t a part of the art movement anymore, The Persistence of Memory continues to offer numerous representations, meanings, symbolics and interpretations. The unforgettable imagery of the melting clocks, the well-known rock at Cap de Creus in Catalonia which looks like a head, the leafless olive tree, the swarm of ants, the deserted landscapes of Cadaqués and his beloved homeland - all of the elements that Dali would use throughout his entire career are there. The artwork is often thought to be a self-portrait in a dreaming state, in which the melting clocks symbolize the passing of time as one experiences it while sleeping. Another popular opinion about the painting suggests that Dalí was incorporating an understanding of the world introduced by Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity. Asked whether this was in fact the case, Dalí replied that the soft watches were inspired merely by the surrealist perception of a ”soft, extravagant, solitary, paranoiac-critical Camembert cheese of space and time” melting in the sun. In the 1970s, Dali revisited his soft timepieces in sculptures like Dance of Time I, II, & III, Nobility of Time, Persistence of Memory, and Profile of Time. He also brought them into lithographs.

Featured image: Salvador Dali - The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Image via art9b.wikispaces.com

As small in size as The Persistence of Memory, measuring only 25.4 x 33 cm (10 x 13 in), the sequel to the famous painting came to life some 23 years later, showing the well-known landscape disintegrating into atoms. While the first work was created under the heavy influence of Freud and his dream analysis, the second reflected on Dalí’s fascination with the science of the atomic age and the exterior world of physics, guided by theoretical physicist, Dr. Heisenberg. The original scenery has been flooded with water, breaking down both what’s underneath and above its surface. The ground is now split into brick-like shapes, floating beneath the atomic missiles that suggest humanity could bring about its own destruction. The artist added another melting watch, possibly brought on by the water, and an image of a fish, which seems to be reflecting the rock self-portrait underneath, as the symbol of life. In a way, the painting represents Dali’s loss of interest for Surrealism and the announcement of his newly discovered interest in nuclear physics and religion.

Featured image: Salvador Dali - The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1954. Image via dalipaintings.net

Also known as Le Sommeil, Salvador Dalí’s 1937 Sleep is another artwork depicting sleeping and dreaming, the unconscious. Here, we see a large, soft, bodyless head sleeping supported by crutches, which became trademark in the painter’s work, as the symbol of the fragility of the supports which maintain “reality”. We can feel the intensity of the painting as everything is propped up by the crutches - even the dog on the left side of the canvas. Dali once described sleep as ”a heavy monster that was held up by the crutches of reality”, and this work seems to perfectly illustrate that notion. Sleep was painted for Edward James, a British millionaire who was Dalí's patron from 1936 to 1939.

Featured image: Salvador Dali - Le Sommeil, 1937. Image via dalipaintings.net

While looking at The Great Masturbator, one of Salvador Dali’s largest paintings, the new elements seem to be popping out of the composition constantly. It all starts with the popular rock formation on Cap de Creus, which is prolonged to form a head facing downwards. On the back of it, a woman resembling his then new muse, Gala, emerges in sexual ecstasy, ready to perform a fellatio on the male figure only seen from the waist down. The painting features a grasshopper and a swarm of ants, which Dalí referred to as a motif representing his sexual anxiety. Has the artist gone through a transformation from the great masturbator to the great lover, with the appearance of Gala in his life? The rock-head continued to appear in future artworks as well, becoming the symbol of his paranoiac-critical interpretations of his unique world.

Featured image: Salvador Dali - The Great Masturbator, 1929. Image via museoreinasofia.es

It is another one of Salvador Dalí’s “hand-painted photographs” in which we see Gala as a reclining nude hovering over a rock at Port Lligat in a dreaming state. Although he started exploring nuclear fission and atomic energy just when this piece was painted, dreams were still at the core of his creation. A bee, symbolizing the Virgin, flies above aa pomegranate, a Christian symbol of fertility and resurrection, out of which there is a Yelloweye rockfish bursting out, subsequently giving life to a raging tiger, who then spews out another tiger, who then disgorges a bayonet about to pierce Gala’s arm. In the background, Dali depicts an elephant for the first time, in this version with long flamingo legs and based on Bernini’s Elephant and Obelisk in Rome’s Piazza Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The painter illustrates ”Freud's discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative”, in which any of the nightmarish elements can cause the subject to wake up.

Featured image: Salvador Dali - Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening, 1944. Image via dalipaintings.net

The chest of drawers seen in the two blue female figures depicted by Salvador Dalí in The Burning Giraffe are another reference to the study of Sigmund Freud, one which claims that the human body, which in Greek times was merely neoplatonical, is now filled with secret drawers only to be opened through psychoanalysis. The female figures, which Dalí on a later date described as "Femme-coccyx" (tail bone woman), are in part stripped off their skin down to the muscular tissue, while the protagonist of the painting, the giraffe, stands in the background with a fire burning on its back. The Surrealist painter described this image as ”the masculine cosmic apocalyptic monster” and he believed it to be a premonition of war. The work, again, features the crutches as support systems which show a personal struggle with the battle in his home country.

Featured image: Salvador Dali - The Burning Giraffe, 1937. Image via dalipaintings.net

A weeping putto, recalling the one of Felicien Rops Pornocrates, sits in the bottom left corner of the canvas, witnessing the demise of the war. From the bare olive tree, which once stood as the emblem of peace, the melting figures play the sad song of destruction, while the cannon barrel emerging from the edge of the painting pours out the familiar symbols of the European art, such as The Winged Victory of Samothrace. The entire scenery cries with loss, immersed in darkness and shadows, allegorizing the emotional effects of a great human upheaval. Spider of the Evening appears to be an extended, much more hostile version of The Persistence of Memory, as well as Salvador Dalí’s magnificent representation of terror, which we could previously witness in the works dedicated to the Spanish civil war.

Featured image: Salvador Dali - Spider of the Evening, 1940. Image via dalipaintings.net

At the peek of World War II in Europe, Salvador Dalí expressed his devastation and the psychological impact it had on him during his stay in the United States at that moment, through this particular work. His initial notes for the work read: ”parachute, paranaissance, protection, cupola, placenta, Catholicism, egg, earthly distortion, biological ellipse. Geography changes its skin in historic germination.” Indeed, it shows the birth of a New World to come after the raging war, referenced through the classical figure emerging from an egg representing the Earth, as well as the two other figures witnessing it all. The man about to be born seems to be based on John Everett Millais’s 1849 painting Isabella. The artwork also stands in direct opposition to the desperate imagery of Dali’s earlier piece, Spider of the Evening, which oozes in a more pessimistic atmosphere.

Featured image: Salvador Dali - Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, 1943. Image via dalipaintings.net

One of the best known examples of Salvador Dalí's paintings from Paranoiac-critical period, Swans Reflecting Elephants is a proper double-image, evoking the painter’s ”spontaneous method of irrational understanding based upon the interpretative critical association of delirious phenomena.” He used this method to depict hallucinatory forms and visual illusions that were the main theme of his paintings during the whole decade of the 1930s. In a still body of water, another recurring element in his oeuvre, three swans are reflected in the lake so that their heads become the elephants’ heads and the lifeless trees behind them from their bodies. The reflections in the water would always served him well in the depiction of change, as we could also witness in Metamorphosis of Narcissus.

Featured image: Salvador Dali - Swans Reflecting Elephants, 1937. Image via dalipaintings.net

In this case, perhaps the most famous example of transformation, Salvador Dali interprets the famous Greek myth of Narcissus. It was the first Surrealist work to offer consistent interpretation of an irrational subject, in this case the death and fossilization of Narcissus. In the painting, as explained by the Surrealist genius himself, the image of Narcissus is suddenly transformed into a hand which rises out of his own reflection, holding an egg, a seed, a bulb about to give birth to the new narcissus - the flower. Beside it, we see the limestone sculpture of the hand, the fossil hand of the water holding the blown flower. Dalí insisted that the viewers see the painting while reading his poem, which was published the same year in a small book by the artist, and to be regarded in a state of "distracted fixation" whereby the image would disappear as it was being watched.

Featured image: Salvador Dali - Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937. Image via tate.org.uk museum. All images used for illustrative purposes only.