Perhaps the best-known artist of the Surrealist movement, Salvador Dali conceived Le Cabinet Anthropomorphique (‘The Anthropomorphic Cabinet’) during a prolonged visit to London in 1936. An admirer of the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, Dali’s uncanny female subject is transformed into a human cabinet, a series of stacked opened and closed drawers through her torso flanked by her outstretched arm, falling hair and distorted limbs. The bottom drawer, adjacent to her lap, is functioning and can be unlocked by two keys respectively depicting male and female genitalia. 

Freud believed that the human body is a cabinet of drawers filled with secrets which can only be revealed by studying the unconscious mind. Originally conceived as a painting in 1936, in 1979, assisted by Marcel Duchamp, Dali modified a plaster cast of the Venus de Milo to create what would become one of his most iconic sculptures.