Check out the exclusive rewards, As our patron, you’ll become a member and join us in our effort to support the arts.Celebrating creativity and promoting a positive culture by spotlighting the best sides of humanity—from the lighthearted and fun to the thought-provoking and enlightening. Salvador Dali’s iconic painting, The Persistence of Memory, is quite probably one of the most famous works of art in the entire world, along with Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Picasso’s Guernica, and a few others—and certainly, it is the most-recognizable surrealist painting ever created.After all, whether or not you know your Braque from your Baroque, those strangely melting pocket watches are instantly recognizable.

This is a part of the Wikipedia article used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). On view. All rights reserved. Please read our disclosure for more info.With its strange subject matter and dream-like atmosphere, To contextualize the iconic piece’s place in art history, one must understand its unique influences, examine its symbolic content, and appreciate the artist’s avant-garde approach to its creation.

When she’s not writing, you can find Kelly wandering around Paris, whether she’s leading a tour (as a guide, she has been interviewed by BBC World News America and

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The Persistence of Memory was painted by Salvador Dali in 1931 and is one of his most famous works.

This face-like figure is thought to be a While the rocky landscape in the painting’s background may look like any ambiguous natural formation, it is actually inspired by Dalí’s native Catalonia.

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An art historian living in Paris, Kelly was born and raised in San Francisco and holds a BA in Art History from the University of San Francisco and an MA in Art and Museum Studies from Georgetown University.

Although it was conjectured that the soft melting watches were the result of Dali’s interpretation of the theory of relativity, Dali himself state that their inspiration was camembert cheese melting under the sun. It is currently housed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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This experimental approach to art culminated in a tendency toward peculiar subject matter that evokes dreams and challenges perceptions. Kelly Richman-Abdou is a Contributing Writer at My Modern Met.