Among the numerous still lifes painted by Rafael Zabaleta, special attention is merited by the type appreciable in this Still Life of the Window: a mixture of an interior scene, in which the still life is situated, with a window that permits a view of an exterior landscape. In this case, what is seen through the doors of the balcony is a street with buildings. The combination of an interior with an exterior landscape was frequent in the modernist Cubist tradition, and cultivated especially by Juan Gris. Even so, the trace of the new realisms of inter-war European painting can also be detected in this oil. The table in front of the balcony presents mixtilinear forms and elaborate decoration. On it is a motley combination of dishes, vases, a fruit bowl, flowers, fruits, a tablecloth and a white sphere. Part of the composition appears to be dominated by different tones of grey, in contrast with the reds, pinks, yellows, greens and oranges of the organic elements of the still life, and the blues of an attractive vase and the cloths on the wall in the background. The rhomboid and floral motif of this wall decoration is one frequently to be seen in the artist’s pictures, and coincides with one he used to decorate some rooms in his house and studio in Quesada, Jaén, his birthplace. By virtue of this, it is possible to see how his private surroundings found their way into his painting. Instead of the flatness and the elusive language cultivated by the late Cubist painters, Zabaleta opts for a more realist depiction and a spatial representation more adjusted to perspective, though making fairly free use of its rules. He also chooses to represent the shadows of the objects, something which Cubism had ignored. The composition of this oil is prolix, displaying a peculiar taste for exuberance and sumptuous painting.

Also appreciable in this still life is another characteristic feature of Zabaleta’s painting, the use of strongly marked outlines, which respond to the role of a guide played by the drawing as, to use his own words, the “skeleton of the picture to which the colour then has to be added.” Eugenio d’Ors, one of the greatest enthusiasts of his work, wrote that he had the ability “to incorporate in the refined painting of an artist the robust and substantial artisanal virtues of a wall painter.”

The Still Life of the Window belongs to a moment in Zabaleta’s painting when he had already left behind the eclecticism that accompanied his assimilation of European avant-garde painting. In his most prolific period, from the 1940s onwards, he worked towards the definition of a language of his own that would eventually lead to what critics have called “glowing expressionism”. The still life was a genre he often worked with, and there is no doubt that Zabaleta used it determinedly to confront the task of convincingly uniting the representation of an interior scene with an exterior view. Usually, unlike the case here, he based such depictions on the rural landscape of his native surroundings. In this mission, skill in the handling of lighting is crucial, as can be appreciated in the Still Life of the Window, which recreates the fall of the exterior light on one of the shutters of the window, by contrast with the relative darkness of the cloth on the back wall. In his repertoire of still lifes, there is a substantial number of nocturnes besides these daytime scenes.

Maite Méndez Baiges

Among the traditional pictorial genres addressed in Rafael Zabaleta’s works, the still-life is one of the most frequent, along with landscape and his portrayals of the human figure.

Window Still-Life (1944) is one of his ‘indoor still-lifes’, from the stage when Zabaleta’s artistic language was consolidated after a period of learning noted for an abundance of ‘eclecticisms’. His ‘still-lifes in the countryside’, his ‘nocturnal still-lifes’ and his ‘chinero’ series’ – geometric still-lifes reminiscent of wall cabinets – are also well known.

In Window Still-Life, he establishes a play on perspective between an indoor space in the foreground where a series of items typical of a still-life – a vase with flowers, a fruit bowl, a plate with a slice of watermelon and a tablecloth covering the surface of a table – are arranged, with depth provided by the plane of the outdoor view of the buildings on a street. The two spaces seemed to be demarcated by a wall papered with ‘floral’ motifs and by a balcony opening out to the exterior. The image is constructed based on a careful overlaying of fields of colour – the objects in the foregrounds are in saturated tones, and much dimmer light is used for the items in the background –, on the thematic contrast between still-life and architecture and on the division between indoors and outdoors.

The poet Luis Rosales wrote in an article entitled ‘Zabaleta. In the Ultimate Art Museum’, published in the newspaper ABC in 1962 that 'Zabaleta’s technique establishes unforeseen distances, and teaches us, for example, that wood is one thing and a table is another. His art separates the indivisible, and there is a popular convergence around it, around the table. Everything is together. All things hurt’. This account enters into that distance that ‘divides and relates some things in regard to others; the exterior distance, which relates things with the world, and the interior distances, which relates things with the painting’, leading to an ordered view of ‘reality’ that affects the viewer. This became characteristic of the artist’s works.

Beatriz Herráez