Which artist painted 'The Persistence of Memory'?

Which artist painted “The Persistence of Memory”? Salvador Dalí painted it in 1931. The small oil-on-canvas work became one of the defining images of Surrealism, thanks to its dreamlike landscape and its famously soft, drooping clocks.

Dalí painted the work during a period when he was exploring his “paranoiac-critical method,” using dream imagery and psychological associations to create apparently irrational scenes with extremely precise technique. The clocks are often described as melting, but their forms are better understood as soft watches that seem to collapse over a branch, a ledge, and a mysterious biomorphic figure.

The painting was first exhibited in 1932 and sold for $250. An anonymous donor gave it to New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1934, where it remains. Its compact size is also easy to misremember: the original is only about 24 by 33 centimetres.

A common mix-up is confusing this original with Dalí’s later variation, “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory,” painted in 1954. The two works share the clock motif, but the original remains MoMA’s iconic 1931 painting.