The Early Modern Era: a Brief Look into 20th Century Art
Lobster Telephone , Salvador Dalí (1932) As with the Romantic and Classical eras of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Modern era of art is filled with many different movements. To focus on the Early Modern era first, I want to mention my favorite movement of the era: surrealism. Created after World War 1, surrealism was a tap into the unconscious mind, where artists depicted illogical or sometimes even dream-like scenes in their art (Barnes 508). A perfect example of this is Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone sculpture. Dalí sculpted this piece in 1936 for the poet Edward James, Dalí’s main patron at the time (Dalí 340). In his autobiography (271), Dalí wrote, “I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone…,” which is strangely not the most out-of-place quote from his book. It was stated that for the artist, both lobsters and telephones had an erotic connotation, hence why the reproductive organs of the lobster were sit