Art Institute of Chicago

Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically

Salvador Dalí

1931/73

Attribution

Salvador Dalí Spanish, 1904–1989

Medium

Shoe, marble, photographs, clay, hair, glass, wax, wood, and metal

Physical dimensions

48.7 × 28 × 10.2 cm (19 1/8 × 11 × 4 in.)

Credit line

Through prior gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman

From the museum

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.

Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0