Good evening. Tonight we go after the story of an extraordinary personality. He's Salvador Dali,
the great surrealist painter ,who sees the world through surrealist eyes. If you're curious to hear
Salvador Dali talk about decadence, death, and immortality, about his surrealist art,
his politics, and his existence before he was born, we'll go after those stories in just a moment.
What's the point of this picture? Is there any point?
Salvador Dali was obsessed with Sigmund Freud. And you could say his beginnings were more than a little "Freudian".
Dali's mother gave birth to her first son in 1901. A child that she named Salvador,
who died at 22 months old. Just nine months later, the Salvador we know was born,
and was given his dead brother's name. Dali was told by his parents
that he was the literal reincarnation of his dead brother. A belief he carried into his adult life.
Sigmund Freud published "Interpretation of Dreams" in 1899 ,in which he put forward the theory
that dreams are the key to unlocking the secrets of the unconscious mind. To access his subconscious
Dali would make himself hallucinate - not with drugs - but rather by using what he called...
He would take micro naps during the day. He would lie in a chair holding a heavy
key in his right hand, underneath which he placed an upside down plate on the floor.
When he fell into a deep sleep he dropped the key and the clang woke him up. In that nano-second he
would enter a state scientist call "Hypnagogia", an in-between state where you are just beginning to
dream but are still conscious. He would use this method with "The Persistence of Memory",
a painting that although stylistically rooted in realism, transcends the world of reason. The strange,
confusing, and often disturbing world we visit in our dreams would make Dali a household name.
And he would remain so for more than half a century - one of the best known and most bitterly
contested figures in the international art world - In 1938 after years of trying
Dali would finally meet Freud, which he likened to meeting God. Freud was 81 Dali 34.
By all accounts they were totally bewildered by each other and Dali would later disavow Freud.
Great art comes from conflict, and Dadaism and Surrealism were two art movements that
developed as a direct result of the horrors of the first world war. A war so brutal
and incomprehensible that artists looked for unconventional ways to make sense of the world.
And their rage drove their artistic creativity. Dadaism, which preceded Surrealism was more of an
anti-art movement. Surrealism was about finding a bridge between the subconscious and reality.
The founder of the Surrealist art movement, Andre Breton, worked at a military hospital in Paris,
and had been an eye-witness to the horrors of the war. He saw firsthand how mental trauma patients
rejected the rational world, and inspired by Sigmund Freud he would seek to liberate
the subconscious through art. There is no dominant painting style in surrealism, but the public face
of it would become Salvador Dali. The mustachioed self-promoter was instantly recognizable, as were
his landscapes of melting watches. As a painter Dali had experimented with lots of styles. Amongst
others, Fauvism, Naturalism and Cubism. Then in 1926 for the first time he visited Paris, which was the
cultural center of the world, and began interacting with artists such as Picasso, Magritte and Miro.
Which led to Dali's first Surrealistic works. However, this recently discovered work was
produced while he was still a teenager, showing us not only that he was an early surrealist, but that
he was also already referring to himself in the third person! Today the art world is unshockable
but Dali's uncensored imagination, his images of sex, blood, and excrement, even under the guise of
the subconscious, were subversive and scandalous. Dali would be expelled from the Surrealist group
in 1934 for amongst other things, his fascination with Hitler who he once said: "Turned him on".
But by this time he was already a well-known painter and on his way to becoming a "celebrity".
The first thing to note is, that despite its huge cultural impact, it is quite small. About the size
of a sheet of paper. Dali plays with a perception of scale, and presents a huge desert landscape
with vast depths of field, reduced to a shrunken world. As if we are looking down the wrong end
of a telescope. In the same way, Dali uses scale to subvert our ideas of reality, he does so with
extreme photo-realism. He painted the unreal world with such realism that no matter how irrational
the vision, it is still believable. This is what makes him unique.
In 1931, Dali was 27, broke, and living in a recently purchased fishing cottage in the
town of Port Lligat, with his future wife Gala. Gala would be a divisive figure for the Surrealists,
and as Dali's fame and fortune grew, she would be constantly at his side,
their life a never-ending round of carefully choreographed appearances.
While the rocky landscape in the background may look like an ambiguous dreamscape, it is actually
inspired by the surroundings at Port Lligat, specifically the coastal cliffs of Cap de Creus,
a peninsula close to the artist's home. The triangular shadow that appears to crawl
across the canvas, is believed to be cast by mount Paní, a mountain near the artist's home .
This early painting in the "Impressionistic style" is the view from that mountain summit.
To me, it's almost certain that his use of space was inspired by the earlier images
of Giorgio de Chiraco who was, like Dali, a follower of Freud. From the landscape
itself, only a few features emerge. One is a dead olive tree growing out of a large square platform.
The olive tree, a symbol of peace, is dead. This reflects the uneasy political climate at the time,
between the First World War and the unrest leading to the impending Spanish Civil War.
Francisco Goya is considered by many scholars to be the basis for modern art - bridging Classicism and Romanticism.
He deeply influenced Salvador Dali in his early years. We can compare the dead olive tree here
to Goya's use of the same metaphor in his "Disaster of War" series, about an earlier brutal conflict.
The limp corpses on Goya's tree are mirrored in Dali's watches. Dali would reference this image again
in a painting (he claimed) predicted the Spanish Civil War, which also references this Goya image.
Dali's technique of transforming objects, exemplifies the surrealist belief that
mundane things presented in unexpected ways have the power to challenge reason. Metamorphosis is a
key concept in the Surrealist movement, exemplified by the paradox of Dali's rendering of the hardest
and most mechanical of objects, watches, into a soft flaccid form. Dali's best work exploits the
ambiguity of our perceptual process and plays with our own fears, by distorting the human body,
space. matter and form. The body incapacitated, the object made worthless.
The painting was done at a time the revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Freud were changing the way
we thought about time, and the subconscious. One idea ties the painting to Einstein's "Theory of
Relativity", in which the scientist references "Time Dilation", with time not being absolute,
but relative. Watches are usually a concrete symbol of space and time. Their deterioration in the
painting reflects the collapse of human notions of a fixed universal order. When asked, Dali said
his true inspiration for the watches was a wheel of Camembert cheese he had seen melting in the sun.
Yet, in this interview he contradicts this - and in fact had a lifelong obsession with science.
He later gave another meaning: That the watches symbolise "Impotence" and the hands on the watches
are the medical scientific sign for male.
We never know with Dali, but if we take the dream interpretation, then the watches which all show different times,
reflect ideas about the passage of time and the relation between actual time and remembered time.
One thing is clear, Time, like the watches is fluid. He had already portrayed a melting clock
in this earlier painting, and it would become his signature motif.
Dali, who knew the importance of branding, would use the melting clocks for his entire career.
Perhaps the most confusing element of the scene is the face-like figure said to be
a self-portrait of the artist. A somewhat similar self-portrait appears in an earlier Dali work.
In "The Persistence of Memory", the figure appears to be either dead or sleeping - or more obviously dreaming.
Dali studied Hieronymus Bosch, an artist often called "The First Surrealist" and was heavily
influenced by his painting and technique. It is rarely, if ever, pointed out that Dali's portrait
is a direct appropriation of Bosch, something I discuss in my video on Hieronymus Bosch.
The positioning of the face could well have been influenced by a rock formation
near his home in Port Lligat.
The swarming ants and insects in Dali's pictures
are clear references to death and decay, a reminder of human mortality and impermanence. Insects not
only cause death but they do of course eat the dead. A year before he made this painting
Dali made "Un Chien Andalou", with Luis Bunuel, which featured his dreams about parasitic ants.
In his autobiography, Dali wrote about his childhood experience of being terrified seeing
ants eating the decomposing remains of a bat. And when he met Gala, he fantasised about her body
covered in ants. The ants are crawling over the only intact pocket watch as if it were a piece of
rotting fruit, rather than a metallic object. We are being asked to question the substance of the watch...
and therefore time. The fly on the clock face is a clear symbolic reference to art history.
In some historic portraits, the presence of a fly symbolises the transience of human life.
Dali, whose life started with the death of his brother, had a preoccupation with his own death.
His family was plagued by loss, and when he was 16, Dali's mother, an early supporter of his talents , died.
"The Persistence of Memory" IS about the fluidity of memory, dreams, and time - but the melting watches,
the dead tree, and the parasitic insects, all point to Dali's obsession with death and decay.
Dali and Gala spent the three years of the spanish civil war in exile in Paris, but when the Germans invaded Paris,
they went straight to New York. He turned up on Broadway and in stores on Fifth avenue, he painted
portraits of wealthy socialites, he designed for opera and dance, and did magazine illustration.
Hollywood came calling, and he worked first for Alfred Hitchcock and then Walt Disney.
He appeared in lucrative adverts and was a chat show and game show regular.
Dali reached the height of his fame in America, but his critical reception during these years cooled.
He was increasingly viewed as a "commercial artist" and his work was greeted with tepid enthusiasm,
and often outright suspicion. Other artists were famous - Picasso was very famous -
but the work came first, celebrity second. Dali, the artist had become a prisoner of Dali the celebrity.
Gala died in 1982 and Dali himself died in 1989, while listening to his
favorite record "Tristan and Isolde". To the day he died, he was, as he would have wished it to be,
a subject of controversy. But his endless self-promotion grew irritating, and his work suffered.
He would later upset many people over his friendship with the dictator General Franco.
But his exploration of the depths of the subconscious mind in his powerful images
tapped into the fantasies, dreams, fears and hallucinations of entire generations.
And he should be remembered as a consummate draftsman,
and as a pioneer of surrealism. An artist who made modern art popular and accessible.
"The Persistence of Memory" is for good reason, the most celebrated Surrealist canvas ever painted.
It really is the work of a crazy genius.