The Disintegration of The Persistence of Memory
Salvador Dalí
SALVADOR DALÍ, 1954. OIL ON CANVAS
For Salvador Dalí, the nuclear bomb ended Surrealism as he had known it. 24 years earlier, the Spaniard had established himself as foremost of the Surrealists through The Persistence of Memory. His melting clocks, an introduction to his ideas of ‘softness and hardness’, relied upon the exactitude of realistic painting techniques to achieve. In the light of the mushroom cloud, Dalí’s beliefs changed; and thus, what had been the Surrealist magnum opus changed with it. The disintegration he sought takes the form of brick-like shapes floating in tandem to each other, notably unbound. Here, Dalí is depicting the breakdown of matter into atoms — the world he had helped define undoes itself and transforms into something as yet unknown.