Art: MARINER’S VISION

MANHATTAN’S Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the world’s richest, recently decided to remain closed on Mondays because the city had withdrawn $35,000 a year from its contribution to the museum’s maintenance and operation costs. From Tuesday through Sunday this week, the Met proudly displayed its latest major acquisition, proving that it suffers no lack of purchase funds. The well-nigh priceless St. John’s Vision (see color), by El Greco, was bought from the estate of Spanish Painter-Collector Ignacio Zuloaga. And although Director James Rorimer kept the price to himself, he called the canvas one of the 20 most important purchases in the Metropolitan’s history.

It is a prize example of the master’s ecstatic old age, and the Metropolitan’s seventh El Greco. Most famous among the other six are the magnificent Portrait of Cardinal Nino de Guevara and the unique View of Toledo. The Cardinal keeps all the bloom of the painter’s passion, but Toledo has suffered and so has the fabulous new Vision. One New York critic complained that the Metropolitan’s restorers had understood “El Greco in terms of 20th century expressionism.”

Most colleagues disagreed, praised the picture to the skies.

Said Madrid Critic Alfredo Ramon: “There are only a few museums whose judgment is infallible. The Metropolitan is one of them. They know perfectly well what they’re doing.”

In all the chatter it was easy to forget the one question that matters to every man: How do I myself feel about the picture? Shock and confusion would not be surprising reactions; they occur as naturally as before the coruscating words of John of Patmos: “I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God. and for the testimony which they held: And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?”

Soaring and kneeling at the same time, the saint lifts his hands high in wonder toward a storm-swept sky. Behind him. chalky ghosts and children dance, fly, and cry out before a mysterious curtain of green and yellow. That is all. The colors are lurid, the forms only half-shaped.

Possibly El Greco never finished the painting; possibly it has lost a section from the top. For those to whom it speaks, it is a last cry of an ancient mariner of the spirit.