Time was the one thing nobody touched
To see what Dalí broke, you have to see what painting still took for granted in 1931. Surrealist painting at that moment ran in two lanes, neither of which had done this. Miró and Masson made loose, abstract, blobby organic shapes; Ernst, Tanguy, and Magritte made dream-scenes that were eerie but painted in a recognizable, even gentle way. And underneath both lanes sat an assumption so old nobody questioned it: in Western painting, solid objects were solid, and time was a given. A clock was a clock. It was the very emblem of order, measure, and reason, the most reliable object in the room. Nobody melted it, because there was no reason a painter would ever want a clock to behave like anything but a clock.
He made time go soft, and painted it like a photograph
Dalí’s move was to fuse two things that had no business together. From the academic tradition he took flawless illusionism: the licked, photographic, fool-the-eye finish of a salon master, every surface convincing. From Surrealism he took the impossible dream-object. And he aimed the first at the second. He took the hardest, most rule-bound thing imaginable, a precision watch, and made time itself go soft, the clock drooping like wet cheese, while painting the impossibility so convincingly that the eye simply accepts it. That is the whole break in one image: not a clock that symbolizes the collapse of time, but a clock you are made to believehas gone soft, because it is rendered with the same flat authority as the real cliffs behind it. This is the “hand-painted dream photograph” doing its work. The method lets dream-logic surface, the canvas becoming a kind of inkblot where a soft head can also read as terrain, and the academic craft makes that dream-logic look like reportage.
And here is the line that ties it all together, in Dalí’s own words. His signature explanation of the soft watches reached straight back to the paranoiac-critical method and the cheese:
“the soft watches are nothing more than the soft, extravagant, solitary, paranoiac-critical Camembert of time and space.”
The line is genuinely Dalí’s, the sentence that fuses his soft watches to his method and his cheese in one breath. But it circulates in several translations, and the exact wording shifts from source to source: you will also find it as “nothing but the tender, extravagant and solitary paranoiac-critical Camembert of time and space,” and as the “paranoiac-critical camembert cheese of space and time.” It reads, then, as Dalí’s known formulation rather than one fixed, canonical original. The thought is firmly his; the precise phrasing is a translator’s.