Lorca, the Drawings: Their Relation to the Poet's Life and Work

Spanish poet-playwright Federico Garcia Lorca created hundreds of drawings using colored pencils or pen and ink. Purportedly the first book devoted to this little-known body of graphics, Oppenheimer's intriguing study traces the pictures' connections to his poems and to his inner conflicts. The masked clowns that Lorca repeatedly drew are said to reflect the sadness and solitude lurking beneath his extroverted social self. His sketches of sailors and gypsies may symbolize freedom and the natural life, but, according to Oppenheimer, these outsiders also mirror the poet's conflict over his homosexuality. Under his friend Salvador Dali's influence, Lorca drew a surrealistic world of ghostly ""personages.'' The album also includes his youthful sketches of Andalusian rural life, stage sets and costume designs, and the dark images of mutilation and vomiting that seem to prefigure his own tragic murder by a fascist firing squad during the Spanish Civil War. Oppenheimer is a university lecturer in England. (March)