Chasing a Shadowy Imp, García Lorca’s Muse

GRANADA, Spain — Federico García Lorca called it “el duende” — in Spanish, the elf — a dark, irrational muse that leads artists to tragic depths. This dangerous goblin, who delights in the “tiny weeds of death,” as the early-20th-century Spanish poet and dramatist said in a lecture in Havana, haunted the streets of García Lorca’s “Poet in New York” and the moonlit night of “Blood Wedding.” It refused to take pity on the barren wombs, the weeping guitars or the silver-eyed Gypsy women of other García Lorca works.

And the little imp is making trouble still. More than 70 years after García Lorca’s death by a fascist firing squad at the start of the Spanish Civil War, the shadowy elf apparently inhabits García Lorca’s country home here, La Huerta de San Vicente, where he wrote some of his most famous plays and sought refuge in the weeks before he was killed.

Thirty international artists, from the flamenco singer Enrique Morente to the deadpan artistic pair Gilbert and George, have visited the estate over the last two years seeking traces of that mysterious spirit. They stalked it in García Lorca’s bedroom, where he scribbled until dawn; beside his piano, where he played for his younger siblings; and before the cold kitchen hearth, where, according to his niece, Laura García Lorca, president of the Federico García Lorca Foundation, he chatted with the servants about the Andalusian folklore that colors his verse.

The product of these house calls is an exhibition of García Lorca-inspired installations, titled “Everstill,” which opened in late November at the country estate. The García Lorca family spent summers at this traditional Andalusian home, now a museum on the edge of the city, from 1926 until the poet’s death in 1936.

“I did a meditation on his bed,” said John Giorno, a New York poet and performance artist who was the subject of Andy Warhol’s 1963 film “Sleep,” at the exhibition opening. “I thought, ‘That’s where he wrote the poems, that’s where he felt lonely, that’s where he plotted the escape from the family he loved because he was a gay man like me.’”

Mr. Giorno’s bedside rhapsody helped him write a poem dedicated to García Lorca:

I want it to rain for the rest of my life

I want it to pour until the end of time.

He engraved it on four “Poetry Fountains” in the estate gardens.

Other artists took the inspiration of García Lorca’s bedroom more literally. Gilbert and George — Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore — photographed themselves in tweed suits on García Lorca’s narrow wood-frame bed. The suggestive title of the image, now hanging above the poet’s desk, is “In Bed With Lorca.” The two lie rigid beneath a painting of a weeping Virgin Mary, like estranged lovers or corpses at a wake.

“We thought of entitling it ‘Dead in Bed With Lorca’ but ‘In Bed With Lorca’ sounded nicer,” George said.

“It’s sort of necrophilia without going to prison,” Gilbert joked.

“It is about oppression, about hiding his sexuality from his mother,” George said in a more serious tone.

“If you want to become close to a subject, you have to become close to the less public part of his life,” Gilbert concluded.

Beneath García Lorca’s bed, two Spanish artists, David Bestué and Marc Vives, installed a puppet show reminiscent of the ones García Lorca produced with the composer Manuel de Falla for his youngest sister.

These marionettes, however, take the form of mechanized insects, and their recorded lines are adapted from García Lorca’s play about a family vendetta, “Blood Wedding.” The show recalls the Surrealist vein of the man who wrote about the day when “the preserved butterflies rise from the dead” and enraged ants “throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the eyes of cows.”

“Under the bed is where the monsters live,” Mr. Bestué said. “If somebody could tell the story of this house, it would be the little critters that remained there.”

The American artist Sarah Morris, known for her flashy geometric designs, painted a canvas inspired by the colorful Moorish tiles in García Lorca’s bedroom. The Korean installation artist Koo Jeong-a recreated an often-photographed García Lorca suit, sized to fit her own petite frame.

In the kitchen an eerie soundtrack by Mr. Morente combines the bellowing of cante jondo, or deep song, that echoes in García Lorca’s writings with the tolling of bells and extended silences. It is not unlike the quiet that reigned in Granada over García Lorca’s death until 1975, when the dictatorship of Franco, who banned his works, ended.

“Lorca is an artist’s poet,” said the exhibition curator, Hans Ulbrich Obrist, co-director of international projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London. “Generation after generation has been inspired by him.” It is rare, he said, to find a literary figure who inspires such a creative outpouring from visual and performance artists.

Part of García Lorca’s appeal stems from his close, though tumultuous, friendships with the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel — a multimedia “magic triangle” as Mr. Obrist called it. The execution of a man condemned for his homosexuality and his liberal ideology turned García Lorca into a political symbol as well.

García Lorca displayed a postmodern distrust of the printed word, said Andrés Soria Olmedo, a professor of literature at the University of Granada. The poet exalted the spontaneity of a reading or a flamenco performance long before words like “happening” and “poetry slam” made it into anyone’s vocabulary.

And that spontaneity — that willingness to struggle with the dark spirit that overcomes an artist in a moment’s burst — is what García Lorca called “duende.” It is what younger generations are still seeking, Mr. Obrist said, quoting the final passage of García Lorca’s Havana lecture:

“‘Where is the duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, seeking new landscapes and unknown accents.’”