Lobster Telephone, Salvador Dali ( 1936 )
Lobster Telephone, Salvador Dali, Gala Salvador Dali Fndtn/DACS
What is the most surreal thing you could possibly come across? A lobster telephone has to rate pretty highly.
What is arguably Dali's most famous work is so much more than just a witty statement. It pin points a moment in history.
It was created three years before the outbreak of the Second World War, yet perplexingly there is nothing more apolitical than a lobster telephone.
The piece captures the whole ethos of the Surrealist movement: art that was an antidote to the stifling political atmosphere ( although Dali himself was said to have had right wing leanings) and a reaction against the cultural, social and artistic status quo.
The Surrealist artists were influenced by the poet Comte de Lautréamont along with Freud's ground breaking studies into the psyche of the unconscious human mind.
Dali’s own irrational thoughts, dreams, suppressed desires and fantasies became intertwined within all his works.
And these repressed ideas – particularly those of a sexual nature - were represented through food.
Perhaps the lobster on the telephone is what did it for him?
Whatever Dali's own meaning behind it, the absurd juxtaposition of these two objects has become a poetic statement that encapsulates what Dali's art is all about.
The piece endures, not only for it’s irrational beauty, but because Dali himself was one of the first art superstars.
By 1936 the artist had visited the States and became famous over there, which was very flattering for him.
And by 1940 he and his wife (who was also his manager) had moved there on a permanent basis to establish the 'Dali brand' and it was in the years following that he gained his glittering celebrity status - which has since only been seen on such a scale with Andy Warhol and, to an extent, Damien Hirst.
"As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!" Lautréamont once famously wrote.
That random encounter of the lobster and the telephone has become an icon of twentieth century art.
Julie Pallot
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