Drawing: Sketches of the Banned

One balmy April evening in 1924, Federico Garcia Lorca, then studying at the University of Madrid, dropped in at an exhibition of paintings and drawings by a young artist named Gregorio Prieto. Already acclaimed as a poet of merit, Lorca also enjoyed sketching. But much to his dismay, the friends who hung on his every word dismissed his every line. In Prieto, he found someone who could appreciate his art as well as his poetry. After the show the two visited Prieto’s atelier, then went on to Lorca’s room. There the poet took a drawing titled The Virgin of Solitude from the head of his bed, gave it to his new friend. Last week the results of the friend ship—more than a dozen of Lorca’s sketches, as well as portraits and illustrations for Lorca’s poems and plays done by Prieto—went on exhibition at the Spanish pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. The event was noteworthy in more ways than one. Twelve years after that April evening in Madrid, Lorca had been taken outside the small Spanish village of Fuentevaqueros, where he was born, and shot by a Falangist firing squad. To this day, there has been no official explanation of why he was shot: he had engaged in no revolutionary politics. But the poet quickly became a symbol for the massacre of innocents. For twelve years publication of his name was forbidden in Spain; not until 1960 was one of his plays again publicly enacted. When the pavilion’s exhibition opened, it was plain that the ban on Spain’s most popular contemporary poet was completely lifted. Red Roses & Phantoms. More than that, the exhibition offers a revealing glimpse of a personal side of the poet’s work. He drew guitars and mandolins, stage decors and a very plain-looking muse. He sketched the heroine of his first well-known play, Mariana Pineda, as abject as ever a young senorita could look, in a yellow gown, clutching a red rose to her breast. Many Lorca drawings are in pencil with whispering lines, others are childishly colored in bright crayons. Several, sketched in Manhattan, where in 1929-30 he wrote his most surrealistic poetry (Poet in New York), reflect the nightmarish images of this verse with ghostly lines that look like threads clinging to drifting phantoms. Prieto is one of the few of Lorca’s friends who had the good sense to preserve the works. Half joking, Lorca would hand them over to the painter. “Many throw my drawings away,” he said, “but I give them to you because I know you will keep them.” Soon they decided to do a book together. It never reached publication while the poet lived, but since his death Prieto has become known throughout Spain as the “Line Poet,” primarily for his exquisite evocations of Lorca’s poetic moods. Butterflies & Starlings. The poet’s own drawings capture more the passion of a moment; Prieto’s, the controlled fire that is Lorca’s hallmark. The imagery that surprises in print, astonishes in pictures. Lorca’s Ode to Walt Whitman, for example, goes: “Not for one moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.” And there is Prieto’s Whit man, bewilderingly beautiful with butterflies snared in his flowing beard. The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, meanwhile, has starlings nestling in her hair in a delightful depiction of a popular Spanish saying describing a frivolous woman.The friendship between Prieto and Lorca was a rare meeting of artistic minds. Says Critic J. Ramirez de Lucas, who is now, with Prieto, preparing an illustrated biography of the poet: “This exhibition brings together the poet who likes to draw, and the painter who likes poetry.”