«Self-portrait in New York»: Reading a Drawing by Federico García Lorca

Abstract

Approach to García Lorca's drawing “Self-Portrait in New York”, where he stands among skyscrapers, harassed by four black animals. The drawing is singular because of its iconography, undoubtedly very New York, but in conjunction with a wide repertoire of earlier motifs. Together, they structure an iconographic syntax where semiological interpretation discovers unexpected relationships with other drawings and texts of the time. The self-portrait outlines it quite well: branches of nerves or blood, the sexual and the divine, the cruelty of capitalism... The threatening animals stand out: horse, lion or dog, this inevitably associated with the chien andalou of Buñuel and Dalí. Because of their unity and coherence, these drawings deserve its consideration as autonomous work, as the poems, the film script or the dramatic works.