
Salvador DalíSpanje, 1904–1989Mag men het zien?
Chicago, Verenigde Staten
Het hoort bij de collectie, maar is momenteel niet tentoongesteld.
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.
Art Institute of ChicagoCC BY 4.0
August 1929
Meets Gala
Dalí met his lifelong muse and future wife Gala, born Elena Diakonova, a Russian émigrée ten years his senior, then married to the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard.
November 1929
First Paris show; joins the Surrealists
Dalí's first Paris exhibition, eleven works at the Goemans Gallery, was a commercial success; André Breton called his new work “the most hallucinatory that has been produced up to now”. That year he officially joined the Surrealist group, who hailed what he would call his paranoiac-critical method.
28 December 1929
His father throws him out
His father disapproved of his romance with Gala and his Surrealist friends, and on reading that he had exhibited in Paris a drawing inscribed “Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait”, demanded a public recantation. Dalí refused and was thrown out of the family home, told he would be disinherited and must never set foot in Cadaqués again.
summer 1930
A fisherman's cabin at Port Lligat
Dalí and Gala rented a small fisherman's cabin in the nearby bay of Port Lligat; he soon bought it and over the years added the neighbouring ones, gradually building his beloved villa by the sea.
November – December 1933
First New York show: “frozen nightmares”
Dalí's first New York exhibition, twenty-six works at Julien Levy's gallery, was a commercial and critical success. The New Yorker's critic praised their precision and lack of sentimentality, calling them “frozen nightmares”.