So many modernists
artists of Federico García Lorca’s time fled to Paris from their home countries
that I have to ask: Why didn’t Lorca go to France? Why did he stay in the more
provincial and conservative world of Spain, a decision that cost him his life?
Waves of Lorca’s compatriot Spanish artists gathered in the French capital,
then the international center of modern art.
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| Federico García Lorca |
In the Cubist
era, Pablo Picasso went to work in the Paris as early as 1904[i]
and Juan Gris left Spain for the French capital two years later.[ii]
The Catalan Surrealist Joan Miró began painting in Paris in 1920.[iii]
Lorca’s friends and dorm-mates at the famous Residencia de Estudiantes in
Madrid, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, both left Spain to work in Paris in the
late 1920s. Dalí, who was Lorca’s closest friend at the time, seems as if he
would have blazed the trail to France for Lorca if anyone would have.
But Lorca never
went to live in Paris, despite the artistic climate receptive to innovative
styles, and despite the fact that Lorca often felt stifled and even endangered
by Spain’s cultural climate. That right-wing streak in Spanish politics
ultimately resulted in Lorca’s murder during the fascist coup that finally
overthrew the Spanish Republic. What made Lorca remain in Spain? Is his writing
different from the modernism of the writers and artists who did congregate in
France?
The Paris art world in the 1930s was friendly to
Surrealism and to Lorca’s project of rooting poetry in dreamlike imagery, while
Spain was still locked in a battle between a reactionary church/state alliance
and the growing republican movement. But Lorca remained to write in Spain
partly because of his close ties to his large family, and partly because he
rooted his art deeply in Spanish culture and in his native province of
Andalusia. Lorca’s regional identification fought with the agenda of the
artists who had taken refuge in Paris and other major capitals. He actively
resisted the internationalism sweeping through modern art in his time.
In early twentieth century architecture, for
instance, this internationalism was right at the top of the agenda. The
International Style became synonymous with modernism in architecture. In
coining this term in 1932, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock wrote in
their influential book, The International
Style, “This contemporary style, which exists throughout the world, is
unified and inclusive, not fragmentary and contradictory like so much of the
production of the first generation of modern architects.”[iv]
The international emphasis of modernism prompted
many writers and artists to change their names to identities that obscured
their cultural roots. The Romanian Jewish poet Samuel Rosenstock reinvented
himself as Tristan Tzara and wrote mostly in French. Paul Antschel, another
Romanian Jew, became Paul Celan and chose to write in German. The American Jew
Emmanuel Radnitzky invented the name Man Ray for himself from the letters of
his full name. The photographer/painter Henriette Theodora Markovic (Picasso’s
mate and model) called herself Dora Maar. Toyen, the Czech artist, was
originally Marie Cerminova. Manoog Vosdanig Andoian, who had an unmistakably
Armenian name, recreated himself as Arshile Gorky. Hans Arp often used the
French-sounding Jean Arp. The list goes on.
In literature and the visual arts, many of the
practitioners of modernism travelled to France to work. In his poem, “Bypassing
Rue Descartes” Czeslaw Milosz describes this sense of coming to Paris from
another country and feeling the pressure to abandon the ways of his homeland:
Bypassing rue Descartes
I descended toward the Seine, shy, a traveler
A young barbarian just come to the capital of the
world.
We were many, from Jassy and Koloshvar, Wilno and
Bucharest,
Saigon
and Marrakesh,
Ashamed to remember the customs of our homes,
About which no one here should ever be told:
The clapping for servants, barefooted girls hurry
in,
Dividing food with incantations,
Choral prayers recited by master and household
together.
I had left the cloudy provinces behind,
I entered the universal, dazzled and desiring.[v]
In
Milosz’s poem there are excellent reasons why the “barbarians” from outside
France are eager to forget their native lands. They come from backward places,
which he masterfully sketches with a few quick lines. These outlying countries
are marked by strict hierarchy (“the clapping for servants”), poverty
(“barefooted girls”), superstition (“Dividing food with incantations”), and
enforced social unity based on outdated and patriarchal traditions (“Choral
prayers recited by master and household together”). But Milosz goes on in his
poem to write about how the search for a universal in the Paris intellectual
world led to a barbarism as extreme as any of the traditional cultures:
Soon enough, many from Jassy and Koloshvar, or
Saigon or Marrakesh
Would be killed because they wanted to abolish the
customs of their homes.
Soon enough, their peers were seizing power
In order to kill in the name of the universal,
beautiful ideas.
Both
those who used repression to preserve the ancient traditions and those who
struggled to abolish them were guilty of excesses of violence, as in the Nazi
pogrom in Jassy, Romania, which Milosz alludes to when he mentions that town in
this poem.
Like Milosz after him, Lorca rejected the
international focus of Parisian modernism. In books like his Romancero gitano [Gypsy Ballads], Lorca drew heavily on the unique cultural flavors
of the region around his native Granada. He was enormously proud of and excited
by his Spanish and Andalusian heritage, another reason he did not want to
forfeit it in favor of a less colorful international style of writing.
Many New World artists who originally embraced
modernism also returned to the areas where they grew up to plant their art in
native soil. Diego Rivera painted quite successfully in the Cubist style in
Paris from 1913 to 1917 before denouncing modernism and founding the muralist
movement in Mexico. He became openly hostile to the tenets of modernism and
repudiated his earlier work. “Cubism was a decadent art,” he said in an
interview with Bertram Wolfe in 1932, and labeled that style “…the art of a
declining bourgeoisie.”[vi] Rivera’s break with French modernism
took a dramatic form during a famous incident when he publicly slapped Cubist
poet and theoretician Pierre Reverdy in Paris in 1917, right before he left
that city.
Rivera’s later work does includes elements of
modernism, though. History seems to occur simultaneously in many of Rivera’s
murals, as if he’d merged Duchamp’s Nude
Descending a Staircase with Mexico’s struggle against neocolonialism. But
Rivera’s response to modernism was mostly to reject it in favor of a more
classical style that he could use for his murals of Mexican life and history,
even consciously borrowing his compositions and his style of painting horses
from Renaissance fresco painters like Paolo Uccello.
In the 1920s and 30s the American Scene painters
deliberately steered clear of modernist movements in order to return to the
Midwest and other regions to portray local life, consciously rejecting Cubist
and Surrealist techniques to borrow from other eras. Artist George Biddle wrote
in 1926, “Slowly I began to feel how different from our own is the French or
Paris mentality…Most French art—indeed most European art—is fluent, detached,
critical, aware of its artistry; while our best American art has always been
sensitive, inhibited, romantic, passionate, naïve in its realism and often not
too critical…of the problems of aesthetics.”[vii]
In fact, the American painters of Lorca’s time were so eager to repudiate
modernism that, like Rivera, they often consciously quoted archaic techniques,
such as Grant Wood’s cribbing Italian Quattrocentro styles in his depictions of
Iowa farm life, and Thomas Hart Benton’s Breughel-like threshers.
Lorca was also resistant to the obliteration of
regional culture in modernism. He mentions Paris denigratingly in his famous
essay, “Theory and Function of the Duende,”
dating from 1933. When Lorca describes a flamenco singer in Cádiz who failed to
perform with duende, he recounts how
someone in the crowd mocked her:
Pavora Pavón finished singing in the midst of
silence. Only a little man, one of those emasculated dancers who suddenly
spring up from behind bottles of white brandy, said sarcastically in a very low
voice: “Viva Paris!”, as if to say, “Here we do not care for ability, technique
or mastery. Here we care for something else.”[viii]
Lorca is placing side-by-side the aesthetic of Paris—which emphasizes
universal artistic measures such as ability, technique, and mastery—and his
native Spain. In Spain what really matters to Lorca is whether a performer has
the quality that “burns the blood with powdered glass”—duende.
Lorca planted much of his art in the landscape of Andalusia. His
collection Gypsy Ballads uses many
surrealist techniques, such as dream-like language and imagery. But the poems
are significantly different from the stream-of-consciousness works that were
then being written by proponents of automatic writing in Paris. “Although it is
called Gypsy,” Lorca wrote of his collection, “the book as a whole is the poem
of Andalusia… with Gypsies, horses, archangels, planets, its Jewish breeze, its
Roman breeze, rivers, crimes, the everyday touch of the smuggler and the celestial
touch of the naked children of Cordova who tease Saint Raphael.”[ix]
Lorca envisions Andalusia as a fusion of its Roman, Arab, Jewish, Iberian, and
gypsy heritage.
But Lorca was not viewing his diverse region through the lens of more
traditional artistic styles, the way Diego Rivera looked at Mexico, or Grant
Wood saw his native Iowa. Lorca was a surrealist, but a surrealist who was unmistakeably from Andalusia.
What Lorca created was a Spanish version of what Marc Chagall did
with his Eastern European hometown in his early paintings. Chagall adapted
modernist practices, using the colors and imagery of the imagination, but
centered his work very much in the local culture of the shtetl where he grew up
in the Polish town of Vitebsk. His dreamlike images of goats, violin players,
old Jews, and flying lovers are painted in a style that undoubtedly breaks with
traditional art. Chagall explores Eastern European through the lens of the
imagination and Cubism, not from the perspective of Social Realism or Regionalism.
Lorca did something similar with his Andalusia. He grounded his
poetry and his drama in a world where the images mated in dreamlike ways, but
were still referring to a recognizable local reality. In his great poem
“Sleepwalking Ballad” from his collection Gypsy
Ballads, Lorca sketches a dream landscape that is both regional and
modernist, one that could only exist in his native Andalusia. The characters
are a young gypsy man, pursued by the Guardia
Civil, who have wounded him in a fight; the gypsy’s love, the green woman;
and her father, whose house the gypsy comes to for refuge and to see his lover
before he’s taken prisoner. The poem has the skeleton of a plot of a
traditional ballad, and it keeps to the Spanish romance or ballad form of eight syllable lines where the
even-numbered lines end in the same two vowels. The romance has a kind of half rhyme that feels very modern in Lorca’s
hands, though the form goes back to the classics of Spanish poetry, including El Cid. Each even numbered line in the
poem ends with a word where the final two vowels are both a, and Lorca sustains this for the entire eighty-six lines of the
poem, a tour de force.
But as much as this poem has the right form and the characters for a
traditional ballad, it veers from that tradition in the very first words “Verde
que te quiero verde” [“Green how much I want you green”]. The speaker of the
line is not the narrator of the poem, and in fact it’s not clear who the
speaker is—possibly the gypsy, possibly the poet himself. The opening has the
passion of a tragic ballad, but the imagery is surreal and otherworldly.
The imagery becomes even more unearthly in the second stanza. Lorca
writes of “the fish of darkness/that opens the road of dawn.” The mountain is
“a filching cat.”
In the third stanza, the surreal quality stems partly from the fact
that it’s not easy to sort out who is speaking and who is listening. It appears
that the gypsy is asking his lover’s father for refuge: “I want to change/my
horse for your house.” In a standard ballad, the father might refuse because he
is afraid of retribution from the law, or because he wants to protect his
daughter’s innocence. But in Lorca’s poem, the father’s reasons for declining
to provide protection for the young man are abstract, even metaphysical:
If I could, young man,
this pact would be sealed.
But I am no more I,
nor is my house my house.
Of course the old man could mean that he no longer has an identity or
a safe home in a repressive culture, but his statement is strangely general and
troubling, like a character in a dream. It is as if the old man knows he is
supposed to be a player in a ballad, but can’t act the part he has been cast
for, like a Pirandello character.
The two friends go up on the roof, where the apocalyptic imagery
keeps coming with hallucinatory beauty: “A thousand crystal tambourines/were
piercing the dawn.” The voice of the young man (or the poet?) intervenes in the
narrative to repeat the beautiful but spooky refrain, “Green how much I want
you green.” The wind, too, carries a green force, with the taste of gall, mint,
and basil. This green is a color both of bitterness and revival.
Poof! The green girl then disappears from the rooftop, like a
character in a dream whose whereabouts don’t stay put. Now she’s swaying over
the cistern. Has she hanged herself? The guardia
civil gendarmes are banging on the door of the house. Will they nab the
gypsy? The poem ends puzzlingly, only repeating its first four lines, never
showing us the end of the story.
“Sleepwalking Ballad” is a perfect example of the way that Lorca uses
local landscape and artistic forms but translates them to a modernist idiom. In
combining these two sources, Lorca anticipated multiculturalism, an artistic
movement that assimilates both the spirit of self-determination that came out
of identity politics, and the aesthetic of modernism, which dipped into the
subconscious and the abstract, to intensify expression.
In fact Lorca’s connection to North American multiculturalism is not
a hypothetical idea. When the poet was stifled by Spain and had to escape in
1929 and 1930, he chose to flee not to Paris but to the New World, spending a
year travelling in New York and then Cuba.
While in the U.S., he immediately identified with African American
culture, equating the cante jondo, or
deep songs of Andalusian flamenco, with the Blues. While Lorca was in Cuba, he
gravitated toward son music, made
famous in the U.S. by the movie The Buena
Vista Social Club. What fed Lorca’s soul in the Americas was everything
that was local and vital, but not corny and traditional.
In his own writing, Lorca felt pulled both by the new directions of
modernism, and by the regional culture of Andalusia. His blend of these two
strong tastes are part of what make his writing so contemporary and alive
today.
[This essay was originally published in Poetry Flash.]
[i] Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, Third
Edition (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1981) 92-93.
[ii] Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Juan Gris: His Life and Work, trans.
Douglas Cooper (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969) 318.
[iii] Miró—la collection du Centre George Pompidou, Musée Nationale d’Art
Moderne (Centre George Pompidou: Paris, 1999) 183.
[iv] Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1966) 19.
[v] J.D. McClatchy, The Vintage Book of Contemporary World
Poetry (New York: Vintage Books, 1996) 129–30.
[vi] Ramón Favela, Diego Rivera: The Cubist Years (Phoenix:
The Phoenix Art Museum, 1984) 2.
[vii] Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the
1930s (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974) 23.
[viii] Donald Allen and Warren
Tallman, eds., Poetics of the New
American Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1973) 95.
[ix] Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca: A Life (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1989) 135.
Zack’s most recent book of poems,
Irreverent Litanies
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