Art: El Greco’s Arrogant Genius

In Washington, the largest show ever in his paintings

The name El Greco automatically conjures up a whole congeries of images, different images for different generations, different concepts for those of different critical persuasions. For 250 years after his death, he was dismissed as bizarre or eccentric. He could not draw. Perhaps he was even mad. Then the French, led by dissenters from the academic tradition like Manet, rediscovered him as a great dissenter. Next the German expressionists like Marc and Kandinsky found in him a justification for the distortion of form to express passion rather than mere representation. Finally, the U.S. intelligentsia, just then discovering the provocations of Picasso and Van Gogh as expounded by the Museum of Modern Art in the ’30s, discovered in El Greco an old master who seemed to relate to their excitement about the new art. They adopted him as a “rebel”—which in those days was de rigueur.

Thus went the myth—credible enough, particularly because the life of no other great painter has less documentation. But five years ago, scholars discovered El Greco’s only surviving writings. Shortly thereafter, Robert Mandle, director of the Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio, sister city of Toledo. Spain, launched a program to reassess El Greco and to put together a major show of his art. It took a lot of doing. He enlisted the help of the Prado Museum. Washington’s National Gallery Director J. Carter Brown, Scholars William Jordan at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Jonathan Brown at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and Richard Kagan of Johns Hopkins. They begged and borrowed at museums ranging from Oslo to San Francisco; in the end nearly half of the 66 works came from Spain, either from the Prado or the Toledo museum, and none of these have ever been seen in the U.S. before. The resulting show, the largest assemblage of El Greco’s works ever seen, opened in Madrid to huge crowds, is now at the National Gallery, and will travel to Toledo and Dallas.

The magnificent catalogue, which contains both color reproductions and perhaps the most definitive discourse on El Greco yet published, argues that he was neither a rebel nor an outcast, least of all an astigmatic. El Greco’s distortions came from his insight, not his eyesight. Earlier treatises on El Greco’s paintings have tended to expatiate on the mystical side of his inspiration and the aberrant elements of his style. This splendid show, which embraces his more mundane commissions and his most grandiose projects, demonstrates that he was an extraordinary technician.

The revisionist view of his career is perhaps less radical than earlier ones. Here was a provincial man, born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in 1541 in Crete, who by the age of 27 had attained a modest success as an icon painter in the Byzantine manner. He then set out for Venice to expand his painting skills. After only two years, when he had absorbed all the schooling in color that Titian and Tintoretto could give him, he moved on to Rome, where he became part of the circle of intellectuals who revolved around Fulvio Orsini, librarian to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. During the next seven years, he prayerfully studied the mannerist distortion of the human figure instigated by Michelangelo. Then for reasons still unknown, El Greco decided to try his luck in Spain, where a friend’s father was able to get him commissions for Toledo’s chapels.

In Orsini’s circle, he had met, talked and argued with philosophers, architects and theologians. He had been treated like a man of ideas, as in fact he was. In Spain, he found artists were rated not much above artisans, paid by the square foot. He would neither tolerate nor accept it. An intellectual artist, he demanded to be treated as such. He also rebelliously demanded to be paid as such (that is to say, more), and for all his life in Toledo he was constantly in litigation over the price of his paintings.

Religiously, however, he was no rebel. Spain in general—and Toledo in particular—was in the throes of the Counter Reformation, and El Greco never wavered in his support of conventional Catholic doctrine. It is true that he lost the support of cathedral officials because his version of the Disrobing of Christ included the three Marys in the lower left corner (conservatives argue that they are not mentioned in the text of the Gospel). He also lost the hoped-for patronage of King Philip II, who disliked the fact that the artist’s version of the Martyrdom of St. Maurice featured Maurice and his captains in the foreground rather languidly deciding to accept decapitation, while the actual decapitation of their troops was depicted in the background. Thus El Greco managed to exclude himself from two major sources of patronage in Spain, the church and the King.

But fortunately for the artist, there were lesser prelates, rich merchants and prosperous scholars who became his patrons. He got commissions for altarpieces in funerary chapels and seminary churches, and for portraits of rich patrons. By 1585 he had signed a lease for a 24-room apartment in the palace of the Marqués de Villena and had established a flourishing business. At times, things were so good that he employed a whole workshop of subsidiary artisans who turned out frames and smaller duplicates of his larger works. He even had an orchestra play for his dining. At other times, he fell two years behind in his rent while disputing a suit for payment on some commission.

But throughout, until his death in Toledo at the age of 73, he stood high in the community of scholars, philosophers, intellectual merchants and such contemporary luminaries as Playwright Lope de Vega. One of his greatest admirers was Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino, a famed young preacher of his time and a poet-scholar who wrote four sonnets celebrating his idol. El Greco’s portrait of him is, beyond cavil, a masterpiece. The picture somehow conveys both the casual elegance of youth and the inner power of an impassioned spirit.

Ironically, the National Gallery show demonstrates that the paintings that endeared El Greco to later generations of intellectuals are perhaps not his best. Those ecstatic faces and attenuated hands lifted skyward, the brooding sky, the hovering angel or two—these elements lack conviction in an era when faith no longer anchors them. To put it bluntly, they seem gauche, in terms of emotions and sometimes even in terms of painting. But it was in these paintings that El Greco developed the visual strategies that led to his rediscovery.

In El Greco, space had vanished. The clouds in paintings like Saint Dominic, for example, were like clouds that never were. His sky became a series of abstract, indeterminate forms, a background on which, it could be argued, abstract expressionists drew. His drapery, unlike the classical Greek drapery used to reveal human form, was instead a thing in itself, a dynamism of color that had not much to do with the form beneath and everything to do with the thrust of the painting’s theme. It is here best illustrated by the towering painting of the Pentecost, the moment seven Sundays after the Resurrection when “a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind” descended upon a group of Christ’s followers. The figure in the foreground has no known identity in fact or legend, but the swirling drama of his robe is essential to a composition topped by the dancing arabesque of the “cloven tongues like as of fire” that “sat upon each of them.” This was, in a word, a precursor of Pollock and de Kooning, a visual effect aimed at a spiritual ecstasy.

What may disconcert both devoted admirers and settled skeptics is that El Greco knew exactly what he was doing. “El Greco clearly rejected the Renaissance concepts of perspective and proportion,” says Fernando Marias, one of the scholars who discovered El Greco’s surviving writings. These are notes scribbled into the margins of the artist’s copies of Vasari’s Life of the Painters and a 16th century editon of Vitruvius’ On Architecture. Beside a passage on Michelangelo, El Greco wrote: “He would make his figures nine, ten and even eleven heads long, for no other purpose than the search for a certain grace in putting the parts together, which is not to be found in natural form.” Like Michelangelo and his mannerist disciples, El Greco argued that intuition, not imitation, was the true purpose of art. Says J. Carter Brown: “To him, painters were philosophers who shaped ideas and communicated knowledge through their art.”

El Greco had his failures. He never could get his angels to float properly. When doing a portrait, he contrived a pose that suited his view; if hands diverted attention from face, he would magisterially scumble them over, obliterating the knuckles without any sense of embarrassment. He might pair two saints (St. Andrew and St. Francis) who lived centuries apart, and for background, arbitrarily use a part of Toledo.

But withal, he also had the arrogance of genius. And when he really set out to paint the Toledo of his own mindscape, the result was one of the most magical landscapes of all time. Toledo is brown. He painted it green, its buildings outlined in phosphorescent light and displaced to suit his pictorial purposes. When he wanted something enough, he could do it—and did. —By A. T. Baker