Salvador Dalí completed The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory in 1954.
The painting is a later reworking of Dalí’s famous 1931 composition. It was developed across 1952–1954 and was first exhibited at New York’s Carstairs Gallery in 1954, which accounts for the commonly cited completion date.
Instead of presenting a stable dream landscape, the later work fragments the earlier image into floating, brick-like blocks separated by water and gaps. Dalí connected this visual breakdown to postwar ideas about atomic physics and the new quantum picture of matter. The composition also adds imagery associated with atomic missiles.
Readers sometimes see 1952 listed because the work’s date range is often given as 1952–54. That range describes the period of production, while 1954 is the accepted year of completion and public exhibition. The painting is now held by the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.