Scottish home for Dali phone
ONE of the most famous works of Surrealist artist Salvador Dali has been bought by the National Galleries of Scotland.
The Lobster Telephone, for which Dali replaced a handset with a crustacean, has been bought for £853,000 with grants from the Art Fund and the Henry and Sula Walton Fund.
It has recently been sold at auction and was due to leave the UK, but the NGS bought it after its export was temporarily barred.
UK Arts Minister Michael Ellis put the export bar on the art work in March.
Now the piece, created in 1938, will go on show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, this week. It consists of an ordinary, working telephone, upon which rests a lobster made from plaster, which fits over the receiver.
Lobster Telephone was made in 1938 for Edward James, Dali’s main patron in the 1930s.
Mr James, born in 1907, was “immensely wealthy” and had a summer house in Gullane, East Lothian. He met Dali in 1934 and the two became friends.
Dali visited Mr James in London several times and Mr James bought many of the artist’s works “straight off the easel”.
Dali made furnishings for his friend, including the noted Mae West Lips sofas, which were shaped in the form of the Hollywood actress’s lips, and the Lobster Telephones.
Eleven were made to fit telephones at his houses in London and in Monkton, West Sussex.