The iconoclastic artist Salvador Dali is best known for his surreal paintings—scenes of otherworldly landscapes punctuated with melting clocks and disembodied body parts. His work, and that of his surrealist contemporaries sought inspiration in the chaos of the unconscious mind and its unrealized desires.

But Dali did more than read Freud and paint his dreamscapes. Less well-known is his fascination with the physical space, and his personal championing of surrealist objects. In fact, Dali’s furniture and objects are some of the earliest and strangest examples of avant garde industrial design.

The answer seems to lie in Dali’s eclectic (and often controversial) Parisian social circle in the 1930s, one that encompassed the who’s-who of the avant garde from CoCo Chanel to Man Ray.

One particular friend was Jean Michel Frank, the interior designer often credited as a pioneer of minimalism. Frank purportedly admired the artistic collaborations of the ballet choreographer Diaghalev and Picasso, and wrote that "I wish one could more often see artists collaborating in arranging houses. The result would be, at the very least, something of our time, and alive."

Enter Dali. In 1935, Dali completed The Face of Mae West which may be used as a Surrealist Apartment, a watercolor that exposes the face of the famous silver screen star within the fixtures of a grand room. The concept hinged on Dali’s obsession with a vision of three dimensional art objects that subverted the viewer’s conception of reality, a future where "museums will fast fill with objects whose uselessness, size and crowding will necessitate the construction, in deserts, of special towers to contain them.”

Unsatisfied with the two-dimensional gouache painting, Dali brought the lips of the painting to life with his “Mae West Lips Sofa”, upholstered in Schiaparelli Pink (the exact shade of West’s preferred lipstick) and first manufactured by Frank in 1936.