Dali House

In June 1931 Dali had an important one-man show at the Pierre Colle Gallery in Paris, important because it featured “The Persistence of Memory”, one of his first “hand-painted dream photographs” and still today his best-known work. There are three watches melting, one atop a biomorphic blob that proves to be Dali’s head in profile, and the rocks of Cape Creus in the background.

Just nine by 13 inches in size, it is “jewel-like in the Vermeer sense”, as has often been said, and repeats the notion of the irrelevance of time with its watches, sands of time, ants with hourglass bodies and the lost hours of sleep, and if the watches double as tongues, there’s a hidden message too: “Watch your tongue”.

In Dali’s explanation, he had been with Gala on Cape Creus in August nibbling at his lunch when he was struck by a paranoiac-critical hallucination. His Camembert cheese was runnier than usual and the double-image clicked into place. From Freud he drew the allusion of a persistent memory, always tracking our thoughts whether we are conscious or not.

There is much that is limp in Dali’s art, giving every observer licence to discuss his sexual impotence. “Dali turned out to be the exact opposite of Picasso’s phallicism,” art critic Robert Hughes noted. “He was thrilled by softness, flaccidity. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote, ‘can be regarded as too slimy, gelatinous, quivering, indeterminate or ignominious to be desired’.”