25/11/2025
We’re thrilled to share that this quietly uncanny Dalí painting - Landscape with Telephones on a Plate, 1939 - has been placed by BlackBook Art Gallery into the Detroit Institute of Arts permanent collection. It was featured in our exhibition this Spring, Mother Nature in the Bardo, in Chelsea NYC.
Painted on the eve of World War II, it belongs to the artist’s remarkable “telephone” pictures—works in which black receivers scattered across plates and beaches turn everyday technology into a symbol of ominous messages and anxious waiting, echoing the tense phone diplomacy of the late 1930s.
This panel once belonged to the great Surrealist patron Edward James, the eccentric poet who championed Dalí in Britain and commissioned icons like the Lobster Telephone and the Mae West Lips sofa. It’s hard not to hear Dalí’s own deadpan line as you look at the receivers coiled on the plate: “I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I’m never served a cooked telephone.”
At the DIA, Landscape with Telephones on a Plate joins a growing Surrealist constellation that has recently included Dalí “guest of honor” displays alongside Frida Kahlo near Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals, and new acquisitions by artists such as Remedios Varo and Alice Rahon. We’re honored to see this painting find a permanent home in one of America’s great museum collections.
#1939
