Le sevrage du meuble-aliment (The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition), 1934

Set on a beach in Dalí’s beloved home of Port Lligat, the present work presents a deeply personal and highly iconographic scene. In the words of Dalí himself, this piece is about "the absence of a beloved person [leaving] a sentimental void in us." The solitary figure seated on the beach is a stand in for Dalí’s beloved childhood nanny, Llúcia. She sits in the posture assumed by centuries of woman mending fishing net, hunched over her work. As a child, Dalí heavily associated his night table and bottle with his nurse, as seen along the right of the composition the weaning of the title takes on a literal presence. The bottle removed and separated from the center of the night stand. Echoing the void within the table, the female figure has been hollowed out, her only support a crutch. Representing the need for emotional support in Dalí’s complex visual language, the crutch here is a physical manifestation of a significant early relationship for the artist.