This resulted in works like André Masson’s Battle of Fishes (1926), a multimedia piece in which randomly adhered sand becomes a mountain range and red splatters leak like blood from a fish’s mouth. By splattering paint, allowing materials to fall and be placed according to chance, and doodling around the resulting shapes and composition, the artist essentially removed their agency as much as possible from the creative process. Surrealists looked to different methods to access the buried information that existed below the surface of their consciousness, but many adopted automatism, a means of making art that embraced chance and attempted to remove consciousness. Instead of rendering a fantastical world in hasty brushstrokes and arbitrary colors, Dalí painted familiar objects in unfamiliar ways.
This “fury of precision” is exactly what makes The Persistence of Memory so surreal. “My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialize the images of my concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision,” Dalí wrote in his book Conquest of the Irrational. The Surrealist vision brings an uncanny landscape to life with unnerving accuracy-when you imagine how a clock would melt, this is how it would melt. Like Van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889) and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907), The Persistence of Memory attracts visitors from all over the world to the Museum of Modern Art as a work that has come to represent an entire movement. The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Spanish artist and Surrealist icon Salvador Dalí is one of the rare works of art that can be conjured with the mention of two simple words: melting clocks.
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