The Persistence of Memory

Soft watches droop and melt over the branch of a dead tree, the edge of a table, and a strange fleshy form lying on the ground, all set in a still, luminous Catalan coastal landscape. Salvador Dali rendered this dreamscape with hard, hallucinatory realism, the limp clocks suggesting the collapse of fixed, mechanical time in the fluid world of dreams. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, the Persistence of Memory is the single most famous Surrealist painting - its melting watches an instantly recognizable emblem of the irrational, the unconscious, and the dissolution of time itself.