Spanish artist Salvador Dali was a popular surrealist artist that was inspired by none other than his Spaniard idol, Pablo Picasso. One of Dali’s famous work is the “Persistence of Memory”. This piece follows the Freudian theory of dream: that dreams are the works that express our unconscious thoughts and symbolizes them through objects.

The Persistence of Memory is sometimes dubbed as just “Clocks” because of the clear quantitative amounts of clocks shown in the picture. The clocks appear to be malleable, melted. At face value, it’s obvious that clocks represent time, and they’re melted in the picture almost as if they’re losing value. I think the melting clocks is supposed to symbolize how in dreams, time doesn’t matter or has no value. In the real world, time does matter, in fact so much that the famous quote “Time is money” is applicable to almost everyone’s lives. But in the dream world, it has no value, time doesn’t mean anything.

The background seems to be near a beach; I think the reason why Dali chose this as the background is because it looks like where he grew up as a child, Port Lligat. So if that’s the case, the clocks could also symbolize his childhood slipping away from his memories because of how much he has grown.

Whatever the meaning may be, without a doubt, this piece holds more than the eye can see.