García Lorca, Federico.  A folding fan, adorned with the signature of the author and one of his characteristic cartoons. Linen, wood, and brass. 223 mm in closed position, with a wingspan of about 365 mm. About fine.        

     A very curious piece of cursilera (kitsch), probably produced for the tourist trade by El Corte Ingles in the 1970s or 1980s, when the Lorca Foundation was licensing the reproduction of objects with Lorca's signature or image. The printed linen leaf brings together an early drawing from the 1920s with a late signature, from the 1930s.)

     Folding fans are of course one of Lorca’s signature props.  One thinks of Adela’s fan in La Casa de Bernarda Alba, or doña Rosita’s enormous abanico de pericón in Tragicomedia de Don Cristóbal y la Señá Rosita, the field of olive trees in “Paisaje,” and of course the “La señorita del abanico y los volantes” in “Canción china en Europa.”  Indeed, in a late work his friend Jorge Guillén, perhaps recalling Mallarme’s évantail poems, used the image of the fan to evoke Lorca in an epithalamium for the union of two literary families:

Podría sólo Federico

poner en copla el sin igual

privilegio de este abanico

por Salinas, por Marichal.