Surrealism and Design 

The Design Museum

Curator Kathryn Johnson has brought together a brilliant exhibition that highlights the links between 20^th century and contemporary 21^st century design. She begins in the immediate post World War One  as fractured societies tried to make sense of the cataclysm. It was their tortured mental landscape that gave birth to the 1924 surrealist manifesto of André Breton. The design which emerged was inspired by the fashion for Freudian psycho analysis and the exploration of desire.

The exhibition  includes a film finally completed in 2003 that was originally conceived by Salvador Dalí and John Hench for Walt Disney Chronos, the personification of time, and a mortal woman, seek each other out across surreal landscapes as clocks melt.

Porte-Bouteilles by Duchamp a readymade bottle rack transformed into an iconic sculpture, this work emphasises the importance of concept over craft – a key innovation connected with the Surrealist movement.

Fur bracelet is by Méret Oppenheim. Oppenheim is believed to have worn her fur bracelet, designed for Elsa Schiaparelli, to meet artists Picasso and Dora Maar at a Parisian café. They supposedly remarked that anything might be covered in fur, leading Oppenheim to create her famously uncanny fur-covered cup and saucer – one of the ultimate Surrealist objects. And finally jettison the iphone reinstall a land line and for use the Lobster Telephone by Salvador Dalí.

A fully functioning telephone created from an unexpected combination of objects, this object is key in showing Surrealism’s transition from art to design. Dalí saw both lobsters and telephones as erotic objects, and his first designs for this object were titled the ‘Aphrodisiac Telephone.’