La Danse du Temps I

Salvador Dalí

bronze, cire perdue
38.5 cm
numéroté sur 350 + 35 E.A.

Certificat d'authenticité avec l'oeuvre

Price on request

The melting clock is the most recognizable Dalinian image and the artist chose to portray it consistently throughout his lifetime. Dalí became obsessed with the concept of time and used the melted watch image in many of his works.

Dalí brings to this sculpture a dynamism, where the clock appears to be literally “dancing”. Unrestrained by the rigid laws of a watch, time, for Dalí, moves to the rhythm of a perpetual dance, speeding up, slowly down, stretching out, liquefying.
The clocks illustrate an important theme in Dalí’s art;the contrast between the hard and the soft, a central preoccupation of the artist. Dalí flips reality, taking the familiar image of a watch which is hard, solid and precise and inverts its characteristics. It is now the opposite, becoming soft, inaccurate, time bends to individual meanings. Again in this sculpture, the unexpected softness of the watch contrasts with the hardened sturdy tree trunk upon which the clock rests.

Some say that Dalí represents in his watches Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity of space and time; the dancing watch illustrating the concept of movement through time.

SALVADOR DALí

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Doménech was born in 1904 in Figueras, Spain. A painter, sculptor, and author, he is considered one of the most distinctive representatives of surrealism and icons of the 20th century.
Influenced by Impressionism, he began his artistic training at the academy in Madrid. On the advice of Miro, he then left for Paris, where he joined the Surrealist group. There he met his future wife, Gala, his “surrealist muse” and the inspiration for his life and work.
Dalí found his unique style around 1929 when he invented the paranoiac-critical method. His works revolve around the themes of dreams, sexuality, his wife Gala, and religion.

The sculptures of Salvador Dalí

In the 1930s, Dalí began experimenting with three-dimensional art and sculpture. His desire was to translate the fetishes and obsessions of his unconscious into volume and solid matter. He thus recreated the major themes of his pictorial work in the form of sculptures. These sculptures were made using the lost wax technique, a process that allows for perfect precision in bronze modeling.

They represent a significant aspect of Dalí’s artistic creation and provide a synthesis of his interest in form. These bronze sculptures are effectively surrealism in the third dimension.


Galerie Montmartre since 2016, with a permanent representation in France and across international art fairs. The gallery handles international, door-to-door delivery with insurance.

The Galerie Montmartre

Open Monday to Sunday, from 9:30am to 6:30pm

Contact us
Catalogue