In The Persistence of Memory, the stiffness of clock time goes soft, the way time does in a dream. Dalí painted the watches limp in 1931 to show a sleeper's time, where hours stretch and nothing keeps its shape.
The canvas is tiny, 24 by 33 centimeters, about the size of a laptop screen. It has belonged to the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1934.
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Dalí did not explain the watches that way. His own explanation was about cheese.
He said the idea came from a Camembert melting in the sun. The story told about that evening in 1931 adds the details: his friends went out to the movies, he stayed home and stared at the leftover cheese on the table, then he went to his studio and added three watches, limp as Camembert, to a landscape he had already begun.
I take the cheese seriously. It is the explanation that comes from the man who painted the picture, and almost every other reading starts by setting it aside.
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