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Weaning of Furniture Nutrition
Date: 1934
Material Used: Oil on canvas
Size: 7 x 9 1/2 inches
This is one of Dali's most subtle but successful Surrealist works. With precise realism inspired by one of his greatest influences, the Dutch artist Jan Vermeer, Dali creates a painting that looks like a hand-tinted photograph of something impossible. This small panel portrays a woman sitting on the beach in front of Dali's house. However, the woman has a hole in her body, eliminating any possibility of reality.
The title is the key to understanding this painting, which illustrates the concept of the word "weaning." "To wean" means to take a person away from his attachments, like a nanny weaning a child away from his mother. The woman is Dali's childhood nanny, Llucia. Here she sits in a pose assumed for centuries by fishermen's wives, mending nets while their husbands are at sea. Llucia has been "weaned" from Dali's memories and placed in the artist's present.
As a child, Dali associated his bedroom furniture and surroundings with his nanny. Like jigsaw puzzle pieces, he "weans" his childhood night table and a smaller table out of her body, suggesting that his nanny and these objects were two parts of the same memory. Their removal creates a void requiring a crutch for Dali's absent nanny's support. Dali offered the following description of this work: "The absence of a beloved person leaves a sentimental void in us."
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