Salvador Dalí’s Memories of Surrealism suite was published by Transworld Art. The total edition is 500, including sets in English and in French.
Each of the prints is a photo-lithograph (photolith) of an original mixed media artwork created using gouache and collage on paper.
Salvador Dalí created the Memories of Surrealism suite in 1971 in express reflections based upon his career to date.
Pierre Restany, a French art critic, interviewed Salvador Dalí about each of the Memories of Surrealism prints. The text appears out of order on printed introductory pages to accompany the photo-lithographs.
About The Eye of Surrealistic Time, Restany recounts his interview with Dalí as follows. “The first idea I ever had about the Eye of Time. I know it well: with it I made a jewel for the Owen R. Cheatham Foundation. A jewel representing a large eye, and in its pupil you can see the wheel-work of a clock and the lens which must preferably belong to someone who has never drunk any liquor, for the bottom must be blueish and pure, like an aquamarine, without the stigma of a liver complaint. The hands on the clock dial move in slow motion, because liver complaints accelerate the pulse of life, as Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus, proved in his book on the combustion of stomachs (one could devote, at this juncture, ten pages to Paracelsus, the father of hermetic medicine, born in Einsiedeln, Switzerland in 1493 and who died in Salzburg, Austria in 1541, to his doctrine of correspondences between the outside world and the various parts of the human body; especially to the combustion of stomachs).”