Salvador Dalí
Spanish, 1904–1989
Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically
INV-2104
Salvador Dalí
Spanish, 1904–19891931/73
Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically
Salvador Dalí Spanish, 1904–1989 →Surrealismsculpture
Date
1931/73
Medium
Shoe, marble, photographs, clay, hair, glass, wax, wood, and metal
Dimensions
48.7 × 28 × 10.2 cm (19 1/8 × 11 × 4 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Through prior gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman
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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