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Lobster Telephone
Date: 1938
Material Used: Painted plaster and mixed media
Size: 6 × 12 × 6 2/3 inches
The Lobster Telephone is one of Dali's most sardonic and unsettling creations. The simple placement of two unrelated objects together - a lobster on a traditional phone receiver - turns the everyday device into something surreal, making it strange but fascinating.
This working phone was one of ten created for Edward James, an important Dali patron. The idea for the outlandish object came one evening when Dali, James, and friends were dining; they were tossing aside their lobster shells when one landed on a phone. One can imagine Dali leaping up from the dinner table and exclaiming, "Eureka!"
This surreal object also can be seen as Dali's salute to Vincent van Gogh, the 19th century painter, who came to symbolize the mad artist by cutting off part of his ear to prove his love to a woman. Dali liked to think of himself as the mad artist of the 20th century, proclaiming,"The only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad!" Here, Dali has created an object that, like all Surrealist objects, must be activated in the mind's eye. Imagine answering a phone by placing a real lobster's claw against your ear; it could easily snip your ear off. In this way, Dali produces a fittingly modern and surreal tribute to van Gogh and to mad artists everywhere.
Dali's comments only serve to reinforce the absurdity of the object: "I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone. I do not understand why champagne is always chilled, and why, on the other hand, telephones, which are habitually so frightfully warm and disagreeably sticky to the touch, are not also put in silver buckets with crushed ice around them."
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