Alexander Eliot – The Dali News

The Persistence of Memory

Most critics up to now have sneeringly dismissed the art of Salvador Dali. It’s almost as if they resented its popular impact. I myself believe he’ll eventually be revered as an uneven, weird, yet absolutely topnotch “Old Master.”

Dali’s signature image hangs at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. Created in exquisite Flemish Primitive style, “The Persistence of Memory” features a half-melted watch dangling from the outstretched arm of a dead tree.

Done in 1931, that picture foreshadowed the horrors of World War Two. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were great cities untll American atom bomb attacks melted and tossed whole multitudes of Japanese urbanites in mid-thought and their wristwatches in mid-tick.

The limp watch that Dali depicted still ticks, tocks, and knocks upon public consciousness. This never would have happened, were it not for the input of an intellectually intense and sexually insatiable Russian woman nicknamed Gala.

(Excerpt from Alex’s forthcoming memoir, to be published by WriteSpa Press)

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