The night the cheese went soft

Here is how Dalí said the painting came to him. By his own telling, repeated across his writings and interviews for the rest of his life, the soft watches arrived one evening in 1931. He and his wife, Gala, had finished dinner; she had gone out with friends to the cinema, and he had stayed home alone with a headache, contemplating, of all things, the remains of a Camembert(a soft French cheese) that had been sitting out and gone runny and over-ripe in the heat, sagging into a puddle on its plate. Pondering this “super-soft” cheese, he then walked back to the landscape he had been painting that day, a bare Catalan shore under a luminous sky, already finished but waiting for its subject. And he “saw” the limp watches draped across it. He added them, he said, in a couple of hours, and went to bed.

It is Dalí’s account, not an externally documented event: there is no second witness to the cheese, and Dalí spent his career building his own legend with a showman’s relish. He told the story, told it consistently, and the leap it describes (seeing one soft thing inside another) is exactly the kind the paranoiac-critical method runs on. But the only source for how it happened is Dalí, one of the great self-mythologizers of the twentieth century, on the subject of his own painting.

Which brings us to the thing almost everyone “knows” about this painting, and which Dalí himself rejected. Look up the melting watches and you will be told, confidently, that they are about Albert Einsteinand the theory of relativity: that the drooping clocks are Dalí’s vision of time made flexible, bent and slowed by physics, a painted illustration of how relativity dissolved the old absolute clockwork time. It is the single most common interpretation of the picture. It is also one that Dalí explicitly disavowed.

The cleanest evidence is on the record. When the chemist Ilya Prigogine(1917–2003), a future Nobel laureate, asked Dalí directly whether the soft watches had been inspired by relativity, Dalí said no. They were inspired, he answered, by “the surrealist perception of a Camembert melting in the sun.” That is, by the cheese, not the physics. Some critics still read relativity into the picture as an unconscious symbol of time made elastic; what is settled is that Dalí denied it as his source. People see Einstein in the soft watches, and it is easy to see why. But Dalí said it was camembert, and on the question of his own painting he gets the last word. If anything resists time in this picture, it is not the clocks. It is the painting’s grip on the public, which has not loosened in ninety years.