VISUAL ARTS: THE NEW SHOW at the Instituto Cervantes, Francisco Bores: Para un Lorca, features the graphic work made by the painter, Francisco Bores (1898-1972), to accompany two sets of poems by Lorca, The Gypsy Balladsand Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.
The drawings are directly related to the engravings made by Bores for a German edition of the Lamentin the mid-1960s, but, in all, the work represents something more than illustration in the conventional sense of the term. Bores made at least 36 crayon drawings and watercolours following a visit to Granada, a kind of Lorca pilgrimage, with his friend Manuel Ángeles Ortiz, in the 1950s, several of them, unfortunately, on both sides of single sheets of paper.
It is thought that Bores first met Lorca on a visit to Granada around 1917. They were the same age, both at the hesitant beginning of their artistic lives. Lorca's sister, Isabel, recalled the artist's presence at afternoon teas, and it is likely that their paths crossed thereafter on several occasions in Madrid, where they mixed in the same cultural circles. They are known to have maintained an interest in each other's work and lives. But by the time Lorca, having unwisely returned to Granada, was murdered by nationalist militia on the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Bores was long established in Paris, the art capital of Europe. He originally went there in 1927, reasonably enough viewing it as more receptive to progressive painting.
Bores was associated with the "ultraist" artistic and literary movement, born of an impulse to offer an alternative strategy to modernism, and then with the "Generation of '27", a grouping of avant-garde poets (including Lorca) and, perhaps to a lesser extent, visual artists - Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel were illustrious examples. In his essay in the beautiful publication accompanying the Cervantes exhibition, Juan Manuel Bonet writes that Bores perfectly typified the spirit of the '27 group. Like many of them, he was influenced by the poet, Juan Ramón Jiménez, an eventual Nobel laureate.
Born and brought up in Madrid, Bores had begun to study engineering and law when he found the lure of fine art irresistible and enrolled instead at the Cecilio Pla Academy and, later, the Julio Moisés Academy. During his involvement with the ultraists, he made woodcuts for various journals. Although he was one of the exhibitors in the first exhibition of the Iberian Artists Society in Madrid in 1925, he recognised that there was little future for what he was doing in Spain at the time; hence his departure for Paris. Established in Montparnasse among several of his immediate Spanish contemporaries, he began to meet some of the luminaries of the avant-garde, including Picasso, the great Cubist painter Juan Gris (who was also from Madrid) and, subsequently, Max Jacob, Paul Éluard, Jean Cocteau and Man Ray.
He settled very comfortably in Paris, to the extent that, as Bonet notes, he began to sign his work "Borès". The grave accent was "noted by observant readers of certain Madrid publications". At the same time, it would be wrong to suggest that Bores had in any way abandoned his native culture and homeland. Like Picasso, he retained an intense fondness for aspects of Spanish culture, including bullfighting and flamenco, and retained close family ties. He visited Spain regularly, particularly from the mid-1940s onwards. But he was anti-Franco, and the dictator's reign certainly encouraged his artistic exile.
Within a couple of years of his arrival in Paris, by which stage he was making thoroughly competent, Cubist-influenced works, he had begun to establish an artistic reputation for himself. After his marriage to Raia Perewozka in 1929, his paintings mellowed somewhat in treatment and subject matter. Arguably he became more himself, and had gained the confidence to paint the way he wanted to rather then the way he felt he should. His paintings reflected the texture of urban life. Later they embraced traditional genres, still life and figure compositions, with great warmth and ease, in many ways remaining true to the spirit of the School of Paris. He came to know Matisse, who was clearly a significant influence.
The wonderfully lively, inventive drawings that make up this exhibition were discovered in a portfolio in Bores's studio some time after his death. He had inscribed "illustrations pour Lorca" on the cover. Bullfighting figures prominently, predictably given that the death of the poet-bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías prompted Lorca's extraordinary lament: "Everything else was death, only death, at five in the afternoon." Bores was quoted as identifying the Lamentas his favourite Lorca poem, "not only because of the force of his images . . . but because also I have always been interested in bullfighting, a very important art for its initiates, leaving aside any sentimental considerations".
Another quintessentially Spanish motif, the guitar, appears in the drawings relating to The Unfaithful Wife. Bores plays on the similarity between the curves of the gypsy's guitar and the woman's body. Grappling figures illustrate The Feudand ingeniously complex figure compositions accompany the story of the taking of Tony Camborio by the Guardia Civil, and his death at their hands.
Lorca is one of those figures whose achievement and influence are out of all proportion to the relative brevity of their lives. Somehow his work transcends time and nationality, appealing to something fundamental about human existence, while also drawing with fantastic fluency on local imagery and traditions. In his essay, Bonet details some of the myriad ripples of influence that spread out through the visual arts from Lorca's words.
Bores's portfolio of drawings, hidden away for many years, are a worthy and welcome addition to that extensive range of work.
•Francisco Bores: Para un Lorca is at Instituto Cervantes, Lincoln Place, Dublin, until Jan 29 (closed Dec 19-Jan 4)
