The Lobster Telephone is one of the best known icons of the 20th-century. A collaboration between Dalí and his patron and co-creator, Edward James, the telephone emerged from a conjunction between the idea of the surrealist object, which Dali had launched in 1931, and the exploration of interior design as a new and creative means of expressing Surrealist ideals. From this exploration grew paranoiac-critical environments, furniture, and surrealist assemblages. Dalí has been credited, as a result, with ‘single-handedly bringing a new dimension, a new lift, to an aging Surrealism.’ The correspondence in The Edward James Archives tells a slightly different version of the story, however, one in which the inspiration for the schemes sometimes came from James. In June of 1936, Dalí was James’s houseguest in his London home at 35 Wimpole Street. From this visit resulted a host of ideas for the production of Surrealist objects and furniture. Anecdotally, James recorded that the idea of the Lobster Telephone grew out of an incident that occurred during this visit. According to James, he, Dalí and some other friends were sitting on the bed eating lobsters and tossing the shells to the side. One, he said, landed on the telephone. This, presumably, reminded James of a visit he had made earlier in the year to a rather aristocratic lady who sat in her bed as the other guests sat in chairs around her. In an ice bucket by the side of the bed was a lobster and unbeknownst to her, a telephone. When the telephone rang, the hostess picked up the lobster by mistake. James related this incident to Dalí who later wrote, in the Secret Life: 'I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone. I do not understand why champagne is always chilled and why, on the other hand, telephones, which are habitually so frightfully warm and disagreeably sticky to the touch, are not also put in silver buckets with crushed ice around them.' Among the objects Dali exhibited at the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris (January-February) was Aphrodisiac Telephone, presumably the prototype of those shortly to be manufactured. Interestingly, André Breton also mentions the telephone in his entry on Dalí for Anthologie de l'humour noir (1940) wherein he writes of a telephone which was painted red with a live lobster as a handset. Whilst the juxtaposition of these two unlikely elements project, at first glance, a shell of innocence and humour, this feeling is eviscerated by the strong sexual connotations of the finished object. Lobsters, it should be noted, are often considered to possess aphrodisiac qualities that are thought to enhance the power and charm of men and the fertility of women. In dream analysis, the image of a lobster is interpreted as a phallic symbol. Dalí himself was renowned for his love of shellfish, more particularly because of the fact that the hard, rigidity of the exoskeleton acted as a womb which protected the softness and more amorphous character of its internal organs. With the Lobster Telephone, which is understood to be female, the lobster is placed on the phone so that the tail, and hence, the sexual organs, are situated directly over the mouthpiece. Involved in both the creative and practical aspects of their production, James commissioned from his Decorative Contractors, Green & Abbott of London, the manufacture and handpainting of eleven lobsters. Although the actual date when the production of the lobsters commenced is not known, they were certainly completed by July 1938. It would seem that, initially, four lobster telephones were painted red and seven white. Of the four red lobsters, three were covered with white paint and then repainted back to the original red. James supervised the production of the lobsters, suggesting and approving the colour schemes for the shell: ‘With regard to the telephone lobster, the Studio are painting them now, and they will be varnished and hard, I think, by Thursday.’ With the inevitability of the Second World War fast approaching, the motif of the telephone appeared frequently in Dalí’s work. Beach with Telephone, The Sublime Moment, Imperial Violets, [see Catalogue] The Enigma of Hitler, [see Catalogue] Telephone in a Dish with Three Grilled Sardines at the End of September, and Landscape with Telephones on a Plate, all featured a telephone receiver broken, castrated, or collected together in a bizarre gathering of disconnected phalluses. This telephone, the seventh known of the seven white telephones, was gifted by Edward James in his lifetime to a close associate, before eight of the telephones appeared on the inventory of James's property at West Dean in 1975.