Persons [ ] A Friendship pierced by the Arrows of Saint Sebastian | Federico García Lorca, Salvador Dali, Cadaqués / Spain, Summer 1925-27

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Federico García Lorca with Salvador Dali in Cadaques, Spain, 1927”A friendship pierced by the arrows of Saint Sebastian.”

Salvador Dali

The “legendary friendship” of Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalì began in 1923 when Dalí arrived at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid to study at the Special School of Drawing at the Academy of San Fernando. The first time they met, Lorca was amazed by Dalí’s unconventional style of dress while Dalí “in turn, was captivated by Lorca” and his first impression of Lorca was of a “poetic phenomenon in its entirety and ‘in the raw’ appearing suddenly before me in flesh and blood”. Despite their antithetical personalities (Dalí was very shy while Lorca was “a font of laughter and music”) and frequent disagreements about art and literature, Dalí and Lorca became fast friends and Lorca helped Dalí integrate into social life at the Resi.

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Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca in Cadaqués, 1925 Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca in Cadaqués, summer 1927

From 1925 to 1927 the relationship between Dalí and Lorca grew as their admiration for one another and their influence over each other’s work intensified. Lorca fell in love with Cadaqués, a coastal village just north of Barcelona, where he went to stay over Easter holiday in 1925 with Dalí and his family in their summer home there. There, they spent their time walking through town, laughing with Ana María, Dalí’s beautiful sister, wandering the beach and watching each other work.

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Lorca In Cadaqués, 1925 / Lorca In Cadaqués while staying with Dalí and Ana María, his sister, in 1927

Salvador Dalí with his sister, Ana María Dalí in Cadaqués

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Dalí with his sister, Ana María Dalí in Cadaqués, 1925

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Federico Lorca with Salvador Dali and his sister Ana Maria in Cadaques, Spain, 1927

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Anna Maria Dalí and Salvador Dalí, Es Llaner (Cadaqués), 1925

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< The poet Federico Garcia Lorca and a young Salvador Dali near Dali’s family summer residence in Cadaques, Spain, 1925 –photograph by Dali’s sister

Cadaqués, September 1928

Dear Federico,

…Federiquito, in your book, which I’ve carried off to read in the mineral places around here, I have seen you, the little beastling that you are, an erotic beastling with your sex and the little eyes of your body, and your hair, and your fear of death and your desire to let the gentleman know when you die, and your mysterious spirit, made from foolish little enigmas in strict horoscopic correspondence, and the strict horoscopic correspondence between your thumb and your dick, with the moisture of the lakes of saliva of certain species of hairy planets. I love you for what your book reveals you to be, which is just the opposite of the reality the putrified of this world have made up about you-the dusky gypsy with black hair, childish heart, etc. etc., that whole decorative, non-existent Nestorian Lorca who could only have been invented by artistic swine who are far from little fish and bears and from the soft, hard, and liquid silhouettes that surround us.

I love and admire you. You, a beast with your little fingernail-you who sometimes surrender more than half of your body to death, or death comes up your arm, from fingernails to shoulder, in a sterile effort. I have drunk death from your shoulder at those moments when you were absent from your own great arms, which were nothing but two slipcovers with flounces from the useless, unconscious tapestries at the Residencia. I admire the Flounder-Tongue I see in your book, the fat flounder who will someday be unafraid to shit on the Salinases of this world and will abandon rhyme and all the other stuff that swine associate with art, and who will do things that are more fun and revolting and curly and poetic than any poet has ever done.

Goodbye, I believe in your inspiration, in your sweat, in your astronomical fatality.

This winter I invite you to leap with me into the void. I’ve already been there for days, and have never had such security, and I now know something about Statuary and about real clarity, far from any aesthetic.

A big hug,

DALí

Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca, winter in Cadaqués, Spain ^