Abstract
Three paintings of the twentieth century feature memory in an unforgettably striking way: Dali’s The Persistence of Memory (1931), Oscar Dominguez’s Memory of the Future (1938) and Magritte’s La Memoire (1948). All three paintings are surrealist, containing visual presentations of memory and time through the intermediary of concrete objects and the art of juxtaposition which are germane to surrealist artistic technique. Moreover, with their visionary but concrete optic on the future, it is all the more intriguing, if not paradoxical, to extract from the artwork some final hypotheses regarding the memory process.
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Notes
From Kazimir Malevich, ‘Non-Objectivity’, as quoted by Linda D. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983), p. 292.
See Herman Minkowski, ‘Space and Time’, in J.J.C. Smart (ed.), Problems of Space and Time (New York: Macmillan Co, 1964), pp. 297–312.
Salvador Dali, ‘Les Pleurs d’Héraclite’, in La Conquete de 1’irrationnel (Paris: Editions Surréalistes, 1935), p. 25.
See Marcel Jean, The History of Surrealist Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (1959; London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960), p. 218.
Salvador Dali, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, trans. Haakon M. Chevalier (New York: Dover, 1993), p. 317. The next quotation is on the same page.
Andre Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture (New York: Brentano’s, 1945), p. 152, n. 1.
Oscar Dominguez, ‘The Petrification of Time’, trans. Lucy R. Lippard in Surrealists on Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970), p. 109. The next citations from this text are on the same page.
John Archibald Wheeler, A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999), p. 12.
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© 2003 Suzanne Nalbantian
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Nalbantian, S. (2003). Afterword. Images of the Artists: Dalí, Dominguez and Magritte. In: Memory in Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287129_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287129_10
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