Salvador Dalí was a Spanish painter who was born on 11th of May 1904 and who died on 23rd of January 1989. He is part of the surrealistic movement, surrealism is a cultural movement who began in the early 1920s.
Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory, one of his most recognizable works, in 1931. First shown at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932, the painting has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City since 1934.
This painting represents pocket watches which melt like cheeses. He painted it to represent his fear of death, because melting watches represent the fall of time. In the middle, we can see a strange creature which looks dead.
When we looked at this painting for the first time, we thought of the global warming, because the landscape is a desert land, and the melting of watches makes us think of the end of the world.