Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically

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.