About this artwork
During the year he created this work, Salvador Dalí wrote the foundational text, “Surrealist Objects” (1931), in which he described it at length:
“A woman’s shoe, inside of which a glass of warm milk has been placed, in the center of a soft paste in the color of excrement. The mechanism consists of the dipping in the milk of a sugar lump, on which there is a drawing of a shoe, so that the dissolving of the sugar, and consequently of the image of the shoe, may be observed. Several accessories (pubic hairs glued to a sugar lump, an erotic little photograph) complete the object, which is accompanied by a box of spare sugar lumps and a special spoon used for stirring lead pellets inside the shoe.”
Bringing together these ordinary and highly charged elements to illicit a psychological response, Dalí conjured Sigmund Freud’s theory of fetishism, which describes the unconscious impulse for sexual gratification fixating on a single body part or object, such as shoes. Throughout the 1930s, shoes continued to appear in the artist’s work, often serving as stand-ins for Gala, the woman who would become his muse, alter ego, and later, his wife.
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Status
- On View, Gallery 395
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Department
- Modern Art
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Artist
- Salvador Dalí
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Title
- Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically
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Place
- Spain (Object made in)
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Date
- 1931–1973
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Medium
- Shoe, marble, photographs, clay, hair, glass, wax, wood, and metal
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Dimensions
- 48.7 × 28 × 10.2 cm (19 1/8 × 11 × 4 in.)
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Credit Line
- Through prior gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman
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Reference Number
- 2011.262
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Copyright
- © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2018
Extended information about this artwork
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