Design Principles and Visual Elements in Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” and Joan Miro’s “Carnival of the Harlequin” – A Compare and Constrast Study

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Tôi tìm thấy một bài viết văn trong lớp học hồi xưa "Art 100" thấy cũng zui zui, đăng lên đây chơi. Trong hội họa cũng như trong âm nhạc, phân tích các tác phẩm là chuyện phải làm, trước hết là để mình hiểu thấu đáo một bức họa hay một bài hát. Không thể có chuyện khen hay chê khơi khơi được, mà cái gì cũng phải có dẫn chứng cụ thể. Sau khi học lớp này khoảng 2004-2005, rồi đối chiếu với nhạc VN, tôi tức mình quá vì thấy trong âm nhạc Vn mình không có chuyện phân tích các tác phẩm âm nhạc bằng các dùng nhạc để trình bày, tôi bèn viết từ từ vài bài viết ngắn về nhạc Trịnh Công Sơn, rồi nhạc Phạm Duy. Nhìn lại, tôi cảm thấy sự học nhạc của tôi tăng lên đáng kể về chuyện đọc nhiều sách vở thêm để có thể viết bài phân tích nhạc.

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Design Principles and Visual Elements in Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” and Joan Miro’s “Carnival of the Harlequin” – A Compare and Constrast Study



A brush, a color palette, a canvas – these basic things are just about everything one needs to start his or her own painting masterpiece. Yet there are not that many masterpieces that withstand the test of art critics and viewers. What makes a painting a masterpiece? This short essay will humbly attempt to answer that question by compare and constrast Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence ofMemory” against Joan’s Miro’s “Carnival of the Harlequin” in terms of their design principles (unity and variety, balance, emphasis and subordination, scale and proportion, and rhythm.) Specifically, this essay will try to show how the visual elements (line, shape, light, color, texture and pattern, space, time and motion) helped the design principles to contribute to the meaning of the works.

By limiting to only a handful of objects and a narrow color scheme to depict a sense of “persistence of memory,” Salvador Dali strives to achieve both the visual and conceptual aspects of his unity in design. The composition clearly conveys the decaying of time. We see lifeless cliffs against a calm seashore, a gray concrete slab, a dead tree with no leaves standing from another larger concrete pedestal, some melting watches, and a dying look-alike fetus. We do not witness any motion at all other than the slowly melting of time represented by the watches, or the food hunting ants in the back of the red watch. Anything that could possibly have a life is being stamped and dragged down by these melting watches. Even time itself is being attacked by the ants. To further reinforce this visual unity of design, Dali uses a brown monochromatic color scheme. The light brown fetus is lying motionless against a darker brown color. The outside edge of the watches and the pedestal also use different color values from the overall brown color theme. The far away sky and the sea water color, in constrast, use the remaining primary yellow and blue to depict the cool and invariant of time. The blue color is also being used in the inside face of the watches as the reflection of the sky to further illustrated the relationship between time and nature. The only watch that seems to be alive by using the red color is helplessly faced down and is being attacked by the heartless ants.

Joan Miro’s “The Carnival of the Harlequin,” on the contrary, is all about life - as remembered from his dreams. The artist uses a plethora of contours and lines as well as an open palette of color to illustrate the variety of his drawing subjects as well as their activities. This composition’s “celebration of life” unity is expressed by a wide range of motions, from a long and curvy black arm of the iceman near the blue table, the tall man playing the guitar, the curvy white smoke from an odd-looking vase at the center of the picture, or the primitive creature with blue lungs rising up from the iceman. Even the red tree as seen outside the window is dancing along with the music imprinted on the wall. The ladder is drawn with skewed rails to help make the composition more imbalance. These long reaching curves and lines give the viewer a sense of busy as his eyes must travel from left to right, or from top to bottom to follow the creatures’ activities. Other shapes such as circles, spheres, cones, cubes, etc. are also included to enhance the joyfulness of the composition. Miro uses a very open palette with high intensity colors such as black, white, blue, red, green, yellow, etc. He distributes this color scheme evenly across the composition. For example, the blue color appears at all for corners of the painting, as it represents the sky, the table, the cone eye, a wing of the butterfly, or as the star tail.

In Dali’s painting, the asymmetrical balance is established by the heaviness of the larger pedestal against the lighter cliffs placed at the diagonally opposite side of the painting. The melting movements of the watches also help directing the eyes toward the fetus, which is placed at the center of the space limited by the cliffs and the larger pedestal - thus help balancing the composition in general. More importantly, this logical placement of the fetus identifies that it is one of the main theme of the painting, an important focus point for the viewer to contemplate upon. Furthermore, the saddle look-alike watch which rests on top of the fetus gives a strong visual weight on how human beings are being very submissive by time and memory.

In constrast, Miro skillfully balances his composition with the use of the lighter wall color but packed with many creatures against the darker floor. The floor consists mostly of heavier weights such as the blue table, the ladder, or the snowman. This division is further amplified by the curvy black arm of the snowman reaching over to reach the ladder. To give the room the light and the breathing air, Miro creates a window with a symbolic sun and dancing trees against a blue sky, and he counters this weight with the blue table on the ground side.

Since the title of Dali’s work is “The Persistence of Memory”, we observe that he emphasizes this title by the use of the three melting watches and how they influence both living creatures and ordinary object such as the pedestal. In every occasion, time seems to put a deadly fate upon things that it delves in. Other subtle focus points of this composition besides the three watches are the red upside-down clock and the shiny and meticulously drawn cliffs against its calm reflection from the seawater, as if Dali tries to tell us that even time is not eternal, but the pure beauty of art itself is?

Against the monotone and slowly decay of time in Dali’s work, Miro’s painting clearly illustrates a celebration of life. Every object in the painting seems to dance with the guitar’s melody, and thus everyone seems to be in the spotlight with equal attentiveness in detail from the painter. There is no emphasis nor subordination in this painting, just as when one is engaged in one’s dream, there is not a definitive answer to what is happening, and there is not really a meaning behind anything. Clearly, the use of curvy lines and shapes help the painter in achieving this somewhat hallucinating state of mind.

From looking at Dali’s painting, we have a feeling that the scenery is real, but in fact only the cliffs, the sky, the seawater and the two concrete slab are real life objects. Other objects such as the melting watches and the fetus all come from Dali’s imaginative mind. Yet, they look very real and quite disturbing, as he uses standard visual elements such as the use of light to cast a horizon, the atmospheric perspective, the slow motion of the melting watches or the dragging tail of the fetus. Scale and proportion in Dali’s work is used in the same way as other painters, only to enhance the awkwardness of his imaginative objects and concepts.

Miro’s painting, on the other hand, is out of proportion, to say the least, as he uses his own symbolic system to describe usual object. Whereas a window in his system still looks like a window, other things are invented or are simplified to the point where we could not identify them at all. The guitar man has the body of a straight black string with a little red shirt, his face is unrecognizable, and his legs look like a moustache. The snowman has a rather long arm with the glove like Walt Disney’s Mickey character. Another man is identified with his red and blue face after we learn that “it” smokes tobacco with a small pipe. It is in this illogical, out of proportion system that this painting achieves its dream-like qualities.

Whereas Miro’s work is all about rhythm, Dali’s work is about stillness. Following the contour lines, we are so busy with our mind contemplating from one subject to another in a hurry, just as we dream about un-identified objects and let them lead us to unseen territories, and without our approval. On the contrary, in Dali’s painting, our eyes are not busy with images, and we have plenty of time to think deeply about eternity, the fate of human kind, the beauty of nature against the destruction of time. In general, Dali’s brown color scheme dominates the available space and sadly hints a doomed future about human existence.

Using the five design principles and the visual elements as a starting point, one could only hope to start analyzing the secrets as to why “The Persistence of Memory” and “Carnival of the Harlequin” are art masterpieces of all time. While it is true that we could identify the use curvy lines as a way to express motion, scale and proportion in Joan Miro’s work, for example, we have not yet stepped into analyzing how all these five design principles work harmoniously and unconsciously together inside the artist’s mind to produce such an extraordinary masterpiece. One could only hope that through a lifetime of observing, analyzing and practicing some form of art, one could gain this insightful and joyful feeling of creating art compositions.

Hoctro, circa 2004-05