Which Salvador Dalí sculpture features a telephone receiver balanced on a lobster?

Salvador Dalí’s sculpture featuring a telephone receiver balanced on a lobster is Lobster Telephone.

Dalí created Lobster Telephone in 1938 by combining an ordinary black telephone with a bright red plaster lobster. The pairing is deliberately illogical: a practical communication device is joined to an animal associated with food, touch, and the sea. The sculpture turns a familiar object into an unsettling Surrealist encounter.

The work was produced in several versions, including examples with different colored telephones and lobsters. Its construction reflects Surrealism’s interest in bringing unrelated objects together so that their combination produces new associations and emotional effects.

Lobster Telephone is sometimes confused with Dalí’s Mae West Lips Sofa, another object-based design made from a recognizable body part. The telephone-and-lobster sculpture is not a painting and is not related to The Persistence of Memory, Dalí’s 1931 canvas of melting watches. Its title is direct: Lobster Telephone.