Salvador Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory in 1931, reportedly in about two hours, while his wife was out. The melting watches draped over a dreamlike Catalan landscape have become one of the most reproduced images in art history. Assembling it as a 1,000-piece Pomegranate puzzle is a stranger experience than it sounds — there is something appropriate about spending several hours reconstructing a painting about the collapse of time.
Pomegranate produces this puzzle under licence from MoMA, where the original hangs. The colour reproduction is precise — the sandy warm tones of the Catalan coast, the deep blue of the sea and sky, the strange pale centre of the composition where the melting figure lies. These details matter in a painting this precisely observed.
How it assembles
The composition divides naturally into zones: the warm sandy foreground with the clocks, the deep blue-black cliff face on the right, the lighter sky and sea on the left. The clocks themselves — each in a different state of drape and dissolution — are the most distinctive elements and the natural place to begin. The sky and sea provide long, tonally consistent sections that require patience but move steadily once you have the distinctive foreground elements placed.
The painting is small in real life — just 24 x 33 cm — which means at puzzle scale you are seeing it larger than most people ever do in a gallery. The detail in the ants swarming the solid watch, the texture of the rock, the reflection of the liquid clock edge — all of it reads at puzzle working distance in a way it cannot from across a gallery room.
As a gift
An obvious gift for anyone who studied art history, has strong opinions about surrealism, or simply appreciates one of the genuinely strange objects in Western art. At $34.99.