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.
