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In 1935, Salvador Dalí transformed one of the most ordinary objects of then modern life — the rotary telephone dial — into a glamorous work of Surrealist design. Created in collaboration with fashion innovator Elsa Schiaparelli, Dalí’s Telephone Dial Powder Compact reimagined a functional makeup case as a miniature piece of practical art.
Continue reading Ring, Ring: Salvador Dalí’s Telephone Dial Makeup Compact
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Salvador Dali’s penchant for optical illusion and veiled iconography are evident in this painting, Madonna (1958). As seen from a distance, Raphael’s’ Sistine Madonna (after 1513; Gemaldegalerie Dresden) is situated within a gargantuan ear — a reference to the Passion of Christ. From close range, it is an abstract work composed of countless particle-like gray and pink dots, reflecting the artist’s interest in nuclear physics.
Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC
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In 1938, Salvador Dali created Téléphone-homard (Lobster Telephone) by uniting a working Bakelite telephone with a plastic lobster.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Salvador Dali, Lobster Telephone
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The idea for this work began when Salvador Dalí discovered an inkwell illustrated with the praying couple (from Jean-Francois Millet’s painting The Angelus, 1857–59). He embedded the inkwell in a loaf of bread and placed them both on the portrait bust of a woman.
In 1931, Dalí described Surrealist sculpture as “created wholly for the purpose of materializing in a fetishistic way, with maximum tangible reality, ideas and fantasies of a delirious character.” Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933) not only presents a woman as an object, but explicitly as one to be consumed. A baguette crowns her head, cobs of corn dangle around her neck, and ants swarm along her forehead as if gathering crumbs. Ants, of course, are a common reoccurring motif in Dali’s work.
Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.
Detail
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This illuminated diorama-like construction contains eleven, parallel painted-glass panels. Both pictorial illusion and actual depth produce a sense of receding space, from the proscenium arch of the front panel to the sky on the furthest, with various bizarre objects, figures and scenarios sandwiched in- between.
This unusual work may have been Dali’s attempt to recreate “a large, square box” he had seen as a boy: “It was a kind of optical theater, which provided me with the greatest measure of illusion of my childhood. I have never been able to determine or reconstruct in my mind exactly what art was like.
Salvador Dali’s The Little Theater (1934) Was Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.