Search results for ""Author Federico García Lorca""

"Let us agree," Federico Garcia Lorca wrote, "that one of man's most beautiful postures is that of St. Sebastian." "In my 'Saint Sebastian' I remember you," Salvador Dali replied to Garcia Lorca, referring to the essay on aesthetics that Dali had just written, "and sometimes I think he is you. Let's see whether Saint Sebastian turns out to be you." This lively and intense exchange is but a glimpse into the complex relationship between two renowned and highly influential twentieth-century artists. On the centennial of Dali's birth, Sebastian's Arrows presents a never-before-published collection of their letters, lectures, and mementos. Written between 1925 and 1936, the letters and lectures bring to life a passionate friendship marked by a thoughtful dialogue on aesthetics and the constant interaction between poetry and painting. From their student days in Madrid's Residencia de Estudiantes, where the two waged war against cultural "putrefaction" and mocked the sacred cows of Spanish art, Dali and Garcia Lorca exchanged thoughts on the act of creation, modernity, and the meaning of their art. The volume chronicles how in their poetic skirmishes they sharpened and shaped each other's work - Garcia Lorca defending his verses of absence and elegy and his love of tradition while Dali argued for his theories of "Clarity" and "Holy Objectivity" and the unsettling logic of Surrealism. Christopher Maurer's masterful prologue and selection of letters, texts, and images (many generously provided by the Fundacion Gala-Salvador Dali and the Fundacion Federico Garcia Lorca) offer compelling and intimate insights into the lives and work of two iconic artists. The two men had a "tragic, passionate relationship," Dali once wrote - a friendship pierced by the arrows of Saint Sebastian.

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In The House of Bernarda Alba, a tyrannical matriarch rules over her house and five daughters, cruelly crushing their hopes and needs. The other plays here also portray female characters whose desires are tragically and violently frustrated: a woman’s longing for a child in Yerma, and a bride’s yearning for her lover in Blood Wedding. All appeal for freedom and sexual and social equality, and are also passionate defences of the imagination: in Christopher Maurer’s words, ‘poetic drama unsurpassed by any writer of our time’.

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Blood Wedding. Concerned with love that cannot become marriage among the primitive hill people of Castile, this is a play of the workings of tremendous passions and tribal ritual toward an inescapable tragic end. Yerma. “The whole tragic burden of Yerma is measured by the deepening of her struggle with the problem of frustrated motherhood.” —From García Lorca, by Edwin Honig. The House of Bernarda Alba. Again about “women whom love moves to tragedy,” Bernarda Alba tells of the repression of five daughters by a domineering mother, of how their natural spirits circumvent her but bring violence and death.

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