Surrealism's familiar faces

Dali's droopy watches keep time in two artistic landscapes. Both paintings soon will hang in St. Petersburg.

By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 17, 2002

ST. PETERSBURG -- Even if they're not intimately familiar with the work of surrealist painter Salvador Dali, most people have seen the melting watches.

The striking timepieces are the subject of two of Dali's most important works and have been appropriated over the years for everything from coasters to T-shirts.

Now, the two Dali paintings that feature the melting watches will be displayed side by side for the first time ever, at St. Petersburg's Salvador Dali Museum later this year.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, owner of The Persistence of Memory, has agreed to lend its painting to the Dali museum, which owns The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, said Dali executive director Marshall Rousseau.

It is the first time that MOMA has loaned the painting, Rousseau said. It will be on view from March 8 through June 8, in conjunction with the Dali Museum's 20th anniversary celebration.

"It's always been our dream to borrow it," said Rousseau, "and show it alongside our painting."

He said the loan was made possible because MOMA will be closed for about two years while undergoing an expansion. It will have a small facility in Queens, but most of its collection will be stored, and a few of its masterworks, such as the Dali painting, will be on loan to museums throughout the world.

Officials with the Museum of Modern Art could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Both paintings are small, measuring about 10 inches by 13 inches, and in surreal fashion, combine commonplace and dreamlike elements. The Persistence of Memory was painted in 1931. In his autobiography, Dali wrote that the image of the watches was inspired in part by a melting round of after-dinner Camembert cheese he observed while alone in his Paris apartment nursing a headache.

MOMA bought the painting in the 1930s for $450 dollars, Rousseau said.

"Today, it's priceless," he said. "No one could give MOMA enough money to sell it."

Dali revisited the theme about 20 years later in Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, which was purchased by the late Reynolds Morse and his wife, Eleanor, soon after it was completed. It was part of a huge collection of Dali's work they assembled over decades that found a permanent home in 1982 when the Salvador Dali Museum opened in St. Petersburg. This year the museum will draw more than 250,000 visitors.

Exact details of how and when The Persistence of Memory will arrive have not been worked out, Rousseau said.

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