Time is running out for local art lovers to see Salvador Dalí’s famous melting clocks in person. “The Persistence of Memory,” arguably Dalí’s best-known painting and a prized holding of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, returns to the Big Apple next month after the exhibit Dalí and Film concludes at the Salvador Dali Museum. The exhibit, which originated at the Tate Modern in London, heads to MoMA for a two-and-a-half-month run after closing in St. Petersburg on Sunday. It features more than 60 paintings loaned from museums around the world as well as films that mark collaborations between Dalí and Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel and Walt Disney.
“Persistence,” painted in 1931 when Dalí was just 27, showcases the trademarks of the artist’s complex visual style — eerily realistic imagery with a surreal twist (those iconic melting clocks), a dash of self-portraiture (seen in the distorted visage floating in the painting’s foreground), morbid symbolism (swarming ants = death and decay). Like so much of Dalí’s work, the painting stubbornly eludes a too-literal interpretation while evoking a universal preoccupation with life, death and meaning with which any viewer can relate.
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2008.
