Journey to a painting: 'Figure in a window'
A girl leans on the windowsill . She wears light clothes. She is hot. There is no breeze. She contemplates the calm sea . Across the bay, a sailboat stands still. The sky prolongs the blue of the sea . The color expands in the blouse, in the skirt, in the curtains. The girl rests on one leg and shows us a tiny sandal. Her skin looks tanned. We imagine an abstracted face. She's probably been there a long time.
dali he painted his sister Anna Maria in Cadaqués, at twenty one years . She was seventeen. They lived in Figueres , where her father was a notary. Salvador received the same name as his older brother, who died nine months before his birth. They took him to the cemetery, stopped in front of her grave and told him that he was the reincarnation of him. He felt that his childhood was a duplicate, a replacement for the original Savior . The death of his mother deepened a conflict that would spill over into his work.
The Dalí family in Cadaqués
Anna Maria was her refuge . They spent the summer in a whitewashed house overlooking the Es Llaner beach . They played football and bathed in the sea. Salvador drew. No wonder he dedicated twelve portraits to her. Later, she stated that, in her sessions, her brother painted patiently and tirelessly . She never tired of posing for him. During the hours when she served as his model, always near a window, she watched the landscape.
With the support of the painter Ramon Pichot , a friend of his father, Dalí traveled to Madrid to complete his artistic training. Already then he had created his own character: long hair, nineteenth-century sideburns, trench coat, leggings . He studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and made friends with his classmates at the Residencia de Estudiantes: Maruja Mallo, Lorca, Luis Bunuel.
Lorca and Dalí in Cadaqués
In 1925, the year he painted 'Figure in a window' , Salvador invited Lorca to Cadaqués for the first time. The letter in which Federico talks about it to his parents is preserved: “Dalí is determined that I work this Easter in his house and he will get it, because he makes me excited to go out to sea for a few days”.
Lorca's visits to the house in Es Llaner became frequent during the summer. The poet became intimate with Anna Maria . In the photographs, Federico and Salvador appear together, on the beach, with a bathing suit . The relationship grew closer. Years later, Dalí affirmed that he decided not to go further and rejected him.
Lorca and Dalí in Cadaqués
Anna Maria did not break her friendship with Lorca . They kept up the correspondence until his death. From that summer, remains the blue that floods the room from the window.
The observer who stops in front of the work contemplates the back of a girl who, in turn, leans out of another frame, another view. Dalí starts from the motif of the woman in front of the window, cultivated by Vermeer and Friedrich , and transforms it into a game of Velázquez's own. Serenity is built from the bare wall towards the seascape: the frame within the frame . To achieve balance, the painter has eliminated one of the wings and, in the glass of the other, he reflects the white houses, the stone walls and the olive groves of Es Llaner. A landscape that will never leave.
The work is exhibited in room 207 of the MNCARS.
'Figure in a window'