From sexy heels trussed and served on a silver platter to Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark, this is a journey through some of the strangest, most shocking surrealist art on the market.
Lobster Telephone by Salvador Dal (1936)
In the 1920s and 1930s, the surrealist movement held that revolutions begin in dreams. They set out to create art from the unconscious, partly inspired by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Dal’s Lobster Telephone is a symbol of one of their most haunting discoveries, the “surrealist object,” a ready-made thing or combination of things that speak to the artist in some obsessive, inexplicable way. Telephones, according to Dal, are sinister messengers from “Beyond,” whereas lobsters are sexual. You can call up a fantasy with a lobster phone.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of a Living Person, by Damien Hirst (1991)
The surrealist object lives on as a formaldehyde-preserved shark swimming incessantly through the white space of an art gallery. Damien Hirst’s toothy tiger shark gapes as it appears to glide towards you, as the refractive perspectives of a glass vitrine give this natural history specimen the illusion of movement: surreal. The shark has become even more bizarrely surrealist with its gradual wrinkling and decay.
Constantine’s Colossus (4th century)
For centuries, artists have been haunted by the colossal remains of an Emperor Constantine statue preserved in Rome’s Capitoline Museum. In the 18th century, Henry Fuseli depicted an artist who was “overwhelmed” by Constantine’s enormous marble hand. In the 1950s, artist Robert Rauschenberg photographed his friend Cy Twombly standing next to the same massive relics. The sheer size of this statue dwarfs logic, and its fragments are completely surreal.
Object by Joan Miró (1936)
When the Catalan surrealist Joan Miró combined a pirate’s bizarre hoard, including a parrot, a woman’s stockinged leg, a map, a hat, and a swinging ball, he created a quintessential surrealist object. His constellation of everyday dream images creates a sense of magic and mystery that opens the mind.
Georges de La Tour’s “The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs”
Artists of the time used the theme of gambling to warn the viewer not to be deceived by fortune and fall into the hands of cheaters. The above-mentioned Caravaggio drawing is thought to have inspired Georges de La Tour’s painting, which depicts cheating in gambling. A man is surrounded by three women in La Tour’s painting. This is one of the most important pieces in the history of blackjack and gambling in general.
Monogram, Robert Rauschenberg (1955-59)
When Robert Rauschenberg came across a stuffed goat while rummaging through New York dumps and antique shops, he couldn’t help but notice the sexual charge of its phallic horns and mythological associations: goat-legged satyrs chased nymphs across the hillsides in ancient Greece, and the devil himself is goatish in Christian art. Rauschenberg finished the job by thrusting the goat.
The Song of Love by Giorgio de Chirico (1914)
The first surrealist objects, according to some, appeared in Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings of melancholy modern spaces and enigmatic relics on the eve of World War I. A rubber glove hangs incongruously next to a marble head in The Song of Love. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who coined the term surreally, observed de Chirico purchasing this very rubber glove. In other words, it is a surreal object from the real world as well as a painted fantasy.
A Glove by Max Klinger (1881-1898)
In this remarkable series of late-nineteenth-century prints, a man – the artist – notices that a woman has dropped her glove. He pours his passion and longing for the unknown woman into an intense relationship with her glove in a series of increasingly bizarre fantasies. Klinger’s masterpiece demonstrates that many surrealist ideas, such as the cult of obsessional objects, were foreseen during the age of fin de siècle decadence.
Louise Bourgeois, Robert Mapplethorpe (1982)
The suggestively smiling Louis Bourgeois holds a truly surreal object in this beguiling photograph, one of her provocatively carnal sculptures, whose phallic form is richly highlighted by Mapplethorpe’s black and white photograph. Bourgeois’s long creative life directly linked the surrealist era to our own. The surreal charge of the woman and her works is conveyed in this image.
In Advance of the Broken Arm, by Marcel Duchamp (1915)
Marcel Duchamp “selected” his readymade before the surrealists were possessed by objects found at Paris flea markets. The distinction between a Duchampian readymade and a surrealist object is that Duchamp’s sly irony differs from Dal’s ecstatic obsessions. However, Duchamp’s objects evoke the same irrational forces that would come to dominate surrealism. This readymade from 1915 features a snow shovel and a title that forewarns of impending injury: Whose arm is about to be broken? Is it yours? This shovel is a witty foreshadowing.
