Lobster Telephone By Salvador Dali Analysis

Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone (1936) is, perhaps, one of the most influential and distinguishable surrealist objects from the 20th century. Commissioned by the English poet and great patron of surrealism, Edward James, the work is a humorous fusion of life and technology. It is comprised of an artificial lobster mounted upon the handset of a functional rotary dial telephone (Figure 1). This comical arrangement was duplicated by Dalí into several off-white versions and the symbolism of the lobster had also been widely incorporated into several of Dalí’s other works, such as the exhibition of the Dream of Venus (1939) . The object also embraces one of the most defining characteristics of the Surrealist movement, the marvelous. The Lobster …show more content…
Replacing automatism as the dominating characteristic of Surrealism in the later years of the movement, the marvelous was first introduced by the father of Surrealism, André Breton. In his literary work, The Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), Breton described the marvelous as “always beautiful.” He continued to reiterate this association between the marvelous and beauty throughout the manifesto by stating that “anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.” This simplistic definition of the marvelous as beauty provided a vague foundation in which Breton built upon in his work, Mad Love (1937). Breton established that “convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.” This particular definition of beauty, along with its association to the marvelous, constitutes the definition of the marvelous. Since “only the marvelous is beautiful”, the marvelous can be interpreted as “veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.” One particular way in which the Lobster Telephone embodies the marvelous is through its inclusion of the magic-circumstantial. The term, magic-circumstantial, is complementary …show more content…
His entomophobia was so severe, that at one point, he jumped out of a window at the sight of a grasshopper. Rather than fleeing from his entomophobia in his artwork, Dalí had chosen to relish in the terror by incorporating insects into the foreground of his works, most notably in The Great Masturbator (1929) and The Persistence of Memory (1931) (Figure 3). The Great Masturbator prominently displays a locust beneath the central figure of a face (Figure 4). Dalí’s terror of insects originated predominantly from locusts, which children would use to torture him with in his youth. The Lobster Telephone also alludes to Dalí’s fear of locusts through the lobster. The etymology of the term, “lobster”, is traced back to the Roman ages with the scholar, Pliny the Elder. The term originates from the Latin root for “locust”, locusta. In addition, Pliny referred to the lobster as the “locust of the sea” in his work, Natural History. These similarities between the lobster and locust are also expanded to physical resemblance. Therefore, the usage of the lobster as the living creature of choice for the surrealist object is more than coincidental to Salvador Dalí. The Lobster Telephone conveys a traumatizing and significant message to Dalí due to its connection with the locust. It is the allusion of Dalí’s childhood fears and anxieties. Therefore, the surrealist object exemplifies magic