Salvador Dalí finished *La persistencia de la memoria* in a single sitting at his home in Port Lligat in 1931 — only 24.1 × 33 cm. He said the idea came to him after an evening migraine, when he saw a Camembert melting on the table. The landscape is the Cap de Creus cape where he grew up: bare rock, blue-green sea, yellowish sky.

The composition is in the foreground: four watches — three 'melting', one closed and covered in ants — and at the centre a kind of melted human figure (Dalí's own face). The watches say that time is not a 'hard' fact but an impression that bends in the mind. The ants (a recurring Dalí image) symbolise decay and the drying-up of time.

Dalí drew his theses on the unconscious directly from Freud — psychological texts were central to the Surrealist library — and tried to bring unconscious images to the surface through what he called the 'paranoid-critical method'. The method is to deliberately load an image with a paranoid reading and then fix it with rigorous academic painting technique. The painting's technique is deliberately like a nineteenth-century realist; the strangeness of the subject, combined with that technique, produces an intense 'dream' effect.

Shown in 1932 at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, it sold for $350. Donated to MoMA in 1934. It is among the most reproduced paintings of the twentieth century; it migrated into Pop culture — from cartoons to Coca-Cola advertisements — as the 'visual signature' of Surrealism. Dalí embraced this saturating popularity without filter, which distanced him from the more 'pure' Surrealists of his generation, especially André Breton.