Seeing the Art of El Greco As Never Before

Seeing the Art 4e Sunday, July 18, 1982 ARTS AND LEISURE Of El Greco ART VIEW As Never Before JOHNRUSSELL WASHINGTON three museum showings in this country Grecos on so long a foreign tour. But 11 Greco of Toledo" at the Na — at the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art, some of the most haunting of all El tional Gallery of Art offers which had the original idea and did Grecos In the Washington exhibit are us a first-ever opportunity of much to push it through, at the National from collections in this country — the coming to grips — in one Gallery and at the Dallas Museum of ''View ot Toledo'' and the "St. Jerome as I place and under optimum Fine Arts. Cardinal" from the Metropolitan Mu 'Econditions—wit! h virtually the entire ca It sounds like a sensible swap, seum, the "Laoc<ion" and the unfinished reer of one of the most distinctive paint though not everyone in Spain was in "St. Jerome in Penitence" in the Na ers who ever held a brush. Such, more favor of sending quite so many El tional Gallery's own collection, the "St. over, is the state of the paintings and the strength of their installation that there can be few visitors to whom the show will not represent a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The some 60 paintings by El Greco on view make a tremendous Impact. They are hung, lit and spaced to maxi mum advantage. Almost without excep tion they have been restored to the visual equivalent of concert pitch, with the re sult that El Greco the colorist can be seen as never before. Individually the paintings look won derful, almost without exception. Collec tively they constitute one of the exhibi tions by which our age will be remem El Greco's "Laocoon" (left) and "Fray bered. It is, for example, an amazing ex Hortensio Felix Paravicino"—"We know perience to see, properly shown and at once the unmistakable elongations of properly lit, what are believed to be limb and feature, the turbulence of three huge paintings from the dispersed altarpiece that once stood in the College draperies and sky, and the clash and clang of Dona Maria de Aragon in Madrid. of the color." Even a gHmpse of those three paintings from a distance is to feel a decisive shiver of excitement. John the Baptist" froia the Fine Arts Museum of San through so many of his big set-pl& es are the ones that— he said quite flatly, for instance, that Tintoretto's To get the exhibition into being at all Francisco and the lately acquired portrait of Giacomo cloud our own horizons and would make us hold on to our "Crucifixion" in the Scuola San Rocco in Venice was "the was one of the neater diplomatic Bosio from the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. It hats if we still had any. greatest picture that exists in the world" — he had a repu achievements of the last few years. It re would have been a very dull Spaniard who did not wish to That sensation has copimunicated itself even within tation in his lifetime as a philosopher, a wit and a forth sults from a Hispano-American agree see those paintings back in Spain for no matter how brief a the White House (though not since January 1981). Jimmyright writer on painting. sojourn. Carter may have spoken for many of his fellow Ameri ment by which more than 30 substantial The Brown/Kagan interpretation is based on the idea So the deed was done in the end, with William Jordan cans when he said to ARTnews Magazine in April 1980 Grecos were lent from this country and that fundamentally El Greco worked for the learned elite as chairman of the scholars' committee that worked on that El Greco was "the most extraordinary painter that elsewhere for an Initial showing at the who made Toledo so pleasant a place. It was with profes the show, which will run through Sept. 6. (The dates for ever came along back then" and that he was "maybe Prado in Madrid. In return the Spanish sional intellectuals that he felt most at home. (Even King the other showings are: Toledo, from Sept. 26 through three or four centuries ahead of his time.'' authorities would lend in strength for Philip II of Spain, of whom he had had high hopes, did not Nov. 21, and Dallas, from Dec. 12 through Feb. 6,1983.) Within this general consensus as to the impact of El really take to him.) The idea of a big popular audience The exhibition fulfils, in fact, a dream that has Greco, many points of view can be held and defended. Themad e him shudder. "If once in a while popular taste is haimted the human imagination for more than 100 years. catalogue of this particular exhibition is, for instance, right," he once said, "it is usually by accident and is not The fascination of El Greco goes far beyond the most in dedicated to a reading of El Greco that is distinctly of ourwort h taking into account.'' telligent curiosity. A mfjor painting by him stands out as own time and may well come to replace the more melo if by right in even the most august of galleries. We know it dramatic interpretations that were popular in the earlier These views would not make him popular today, but at once by the unmistaiable elongations of limb and fea part of this century. Put forward by Jonathan Brown of they throw light on something that comes out very ture, the turbulence of draperies and sky, and the clash the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and strongly indeed in the Washington show — the extent to and clang of the color. Never were faces, never were strongly seconded by Richard L. Kagan of Johns Hopkinswhic h El Greco's deepest feelings were engaged by the bodies, never was landscape so painted before. University in Baltimore, the< argument suggests that El portrayal of men of learning and substance. Not only is this manifest in the room of portraits—the " Elderly Gen- Quite apart from their hallucinatory quality, his Greco was not primarily a mystic or a visionary artist. tlemem" from the Prado is one of the most moving por paintings are present to us, and they touch the nerve of Still less was he the prisoner of a romantic subjectivi traits of old age in Western painting — but it comes out no our time, in a quite particular way. Ever since El Greco ty. By adoption, though not by birth, he was a man of Tole less strongly in the portraits of saints to which EI Greco was rediscovered in the 19th century it has seemed to onedo , and the product in many ways of the learned, end gave much of his time. The ptiilosopher-saint overlaps in generation after another that he is not so much timeless lessly ruminative and not at all naive society that existed the canon of El Greco's paintings with the saintly philoso 0 as specifically modem. there. It was in Rome, and in the circle of Carditial Ales- pher — so much so, in fact, that we might reasonably mis sandro Famese, that he had come to know not only Fulvio • • • take the one for the other. To Thtophile Gautler, the French poet, novelist, Orsini, the foremost classical scholar of the day, but a critic and resourceful traveler who saw his paintings in small group of scholars and theologians who had come to This can well be seen, for instance, in the big "Pentc Spain as early as 1840, El Greco was the precursor of the Rome from Spain, and more specifically from Toledo. cost" that has been lent by the Prado. Where other Old European Romantic movement in all its craving for the For reasons that have never been made quite clearMaster. s might have varied the physiognomic derivation strange and the exteme. To Edouard Manet in 1865, El El Greco's career in Italy never got off the ground. It was of the followers of Christ, El Greco kept to the kind of face Greco was the great alfsmative — the individual genius in Toledo that he felt welcome, and it was in Toledo that that he knew and liked, just as he did in the intimate por who went his own way, just as Manet himself was aiming he stayed. He was touchy about money, and he was on thtraie t of St. Ildefonso in the National Gallery's own collec to do. In the 1890's, Spanish painters then living in Paris outs with the cathedral clergymen, but with just one or tion. And so it is that in the art, as much as in what we adopted him as their gmde and msntor. two discerning patrons and the assurance of a vigorous inkno w of the personal character of El Greco, the image To the Blue Rider group in Munich in 1912, El Greco tellectual life he kept busy. As to this, and as to the social,tha t stays longest with us is that of the seasoned thinker, typified that "mystical iuner construction" that it was the political, professional, financial and doctrinal aspects of rather than that of the God-struck wild man whom earlier task of their generation to rediscover. To the English El Greco's life in Toledo, Brown and Kagan have a great generations had seen in the work. critic Roger Fry in London in 1920 El Greco was the ar deal to tell us.

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