The Persistence of Memory

Salvador Dalí · 1931

Dalí’s surrealist icon: three pocket watches melt over a tree branch, a plinth, and a soft anamorphic self-portrait, while a fourth is swarmed by ants on Catalan cliffs. Per Dalí, the imagery arrived while watching Camembert cheese sag on a summer evening. Painted with old-master precision in a canvas barely larger than a sheet of A4.

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