The Ideas Behind The Persistence of Memory and Pillars of Society

George Grosz, Pillars of Society (1926)

George Grosz was born in Berlin on July 26, 1893, he studied at Dresden Art Academy and began his career as a cartoonist. He later joined a Dada movement in 1917. And he was a famous figure in Neue Sachlikeit. Grosz worked as an infantryman in the German army during WWI. Therefore, the defeat of Germany in WWI along with large casualties, violence, bloodshed and other horrors in during the war may have negative effects of his perspective of war that he enrolled the Dada movement to protest against the war and rallied humanism, and most of Grosz ‘s works reflected his satirical views of German political and economic failures as well as the corruption in German society.

His Pillars of Society was a quintessential German expressionists work. It depicted several men with distorted faces which represented businessmen, clergy and generals who were considered as elite classes in Germany, and they supported Fascism. The men in front of the painting who held newspaper and a weapon all had complicated emotional faces, this indicated their dumbness and lack of intelligence. At the back of the painting, a Nazi-clergy (black one) was pleading for peace but the paradox presented that no one was responding and there were fire and chaos out of the window. This painting by Grosz reflected the development of German expressionism as it emphasized the painter’s inner feeling toward the horrible war and corruption in society, the painting also used bright colors and unrealistic depiction of emotions which reflected the skills used in German expressionism.

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory (1931)

Salvador Dali was born in Spain on May 11, 1904. He was considered as an eccentric from a young age by his parents that his art was questioned by them. Dali studied at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid where lots of art styles influenced him including Cubism and Metaphysics. He went to Paris and was greatly affected by Pablo Picasso renaissance artists and especially Freud. He was the master as a surrealist that his works often showed unrealistic space and imaginary characters, his works were associated to solve Psychological problems. He created “paranoiac –critical method” to depict the unreality of the world. However, his work was opposed by Hitler and viewed as anti-revolutionary.

The Persistence of Memory was created under the influencing ideology of automatism which advocated artists’ self-consciousness. In this painting, there were many distorted (melted) clocks in a desolate landscape which were unreal. It represented a “dream state” of people where things were illogical. Some scholars interpreted that the melted clocks symbolized Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that they assumed Dali view clocks as primitive machines therefore the clocks symbolized time and space. The painting reflected the values of surrealism as the depiction of unrealistic world and things and created a dream state of people.