Lobster Telephone [SEP] inception
Lobster Telephone
Lobster Telephone (also known as Aphrodisiac Telephone) is a Surrealist object, created by Salvador Dalí in 1936 for the English poet Edward James (1907–1984), a leading collector of surrealist art. In his book "The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí", Dalí wrote teasingly of his demand to know why, when he asked for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, he was never presented with a boiled telephone.
Description.
The work is a composite of an ordinary working telephone and a lobster made
telephone, its receiver replaced by a lobster surrounded by flies. A similar drawing is printed in "The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí" which contains the following:
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.