Barbarous Nights: Lorca's Drawings

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Lorca's Drawings

It is no wonder that Lorca was a visual artist as well considering the vivid images that saturate his writing. While he began by doodling caricatures of his professors and friends at school in Granada, Lorca continued to draw throughout his life, both exploring new ideas and illustrating his own plays and poems. Most of his drawings come several distinct periods in his life, including the times surrounding his friendship with Dalí, while Lorca was studying and writing in New York, and later while in Buenos Aires, where he spent a great deal of time drawing rather than writing and even worked on illustrations for Pablo Neruda (Stainton 342). In 1926, Lorca even exhibited his art work at the Dalman Galleries in Barcelona with the help of Dalí and his friend the critic Sebastía Gasch, and his drawings were published in the newspapers and in his own magazine, gallo, throughout his career (Cuitiño 51, Stainton).

The following is a selection of drawings and paintings made by Lorca. While they are not necessarily illustrations, they demonstrate the way in which Lorca was thinking about particular themes, symbols and recurring motifs in both language and line, and help us to better understand the images and feelings that are expressed in his writing.