Romantics and Modernists alike treasured the old master El Greco (1541–1614) for the skewed perspectives and strangely distorted figures that fill his paintings—that is, when they weren’t blaming those aesthetic quirks on drugs, madness, or astigmatism. For the 400th anniversary of his death, three New York institutions have gathered their substantial holdings of the painter’s works—at 19 paintings, more than anywhere outside of the Prado in Madrid!—in two concise exhibitions. While “El Greco at the Frick Collection” comprises three canvases, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “El Greco in New York” features contributions from the Hispanic Society of America, as well as its own collection. The larger Met show allows us to trace the artist’s trajectory.
Born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Crete, then a Venetian possession, El Greco painted Byzantine icons before leaving to study in Italy. The early Christ Healing the Blind, ca. 1570, a fairly typical late-Renaissance religious scene, shows the influence of his artistic training in Venice in its impressive if imperfect approximation of the modes of artists such as Veronese. In 1577, El Greco moved permanently to Spain. Subsequent devotional pictures show the artist’s increasing mastery of Renaissance idiom. Christ Carrying the Cross, ca. 1580–85 (watery-eyed, but with a perfect manicure), and The Holy Family, ca. 1585 (the Madonna charming, with an up-do and a gauzy mantilla; the nursing baby Jesus beady-eyed, with an oddly shaped head), deliver Counter-Reformation messages with a sweet sentimentality that seems to prefigure Murillo.
But later paintings, such as the Adoration of the Shepherds, ca. 1605–1610, give us the El Greco we have come to know and love. In this Nativity set at night, he illuminates a circle of figures only by light that seems to emanate from the Christ child in the center, the blazing Revelation embodied. Mary, Joseph and the shepherds are too long and lean by half; their muscles and clothing seem to writhe with lives of their own, little concerned with anatomy or physics. The artist flattens space so that it no longer makes perspectival sense, and paints with short, flickering strokes that impart a nervous energy to the whole. El Greco’s personal version of the anti-natural, anxious and elegant stylizations of Italian Mannerism produced an image both mysterious and fervent.
Less characteristic, secular paintings, too, reveal an intense, idiosyncratic artist. As many have done, we can easily read the small, sober Portrait of an Old Man, ca. 1595–1600, a probing study of character and mood, as a wonderfully appraising self-portrait, despite the fact that the bust-length sitter seems stretched vertically, from white-ruffed neck to high domed pate. And the otherworldly landscape of his adopted home, A View of Toledo, ca. 1598–99—all glowing white architecture nestled in verdant green hills under dramatically stormy clouds—launched a thousand Tolkien calendars.
The late, unfinished The Vision of Saint John, ca. 1609 – 14, illustrating a passage from the Book of Revelation, really demonstrates El Greco’s full-on weirdness. In an oddly compressed space, a maroon sky glowers over naked martyrs backed by animated draperies. The figures appear lumpy, yet impossibly attenuated, especially that of the huge, kneeling Saint John himself, looming over us on the left, whose robe practically crackles with electric highlights. Darkly enigmatic, disturbing, and suffused with emotional religiosity, yet here nearly divorced from legible religious meaning, the canvas anticipates the galvanizing deformations of Expressionism by several centuries. Its striking treatment of bodies and pictorial space also greatly influenced the 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Picasso, who studied it when it hung in the studio of a painter friend in Paris.
The Frick shows the three canvases from its collection, including the full-length portrait of Vincenzo Anastagi, ca. 1575, which seems to exist somewhere between Titian and Velázquez, and a picture of a gaunt St. Jerome, 1590–1600, dressed in pink cardinal’s robes and nearly identical to a version of the same subject at the Met (one would have liked to have seen these two compared side-by-side). The highlight is the small but action-packed Purification of the Temple, ca. 1600, in which a superhero Christ bursts through an archway swinging, repelling half-dressed sinners away with an upraised arm. The centrifugal force of the composition adds a powerful visual punch to the Counter-Reformation symbolism of cleansing heresy from the Church.
A bonus fourth painting by El Greco at The Frick hangs in an adjacent show of loans from the Scottish National Gallery. An Allegory (Fábula), ca. 1585–95, features a closely cropped group of three figures. In the center, a boy lights a candle from what looks like a burning twist of paper or piece of wood, illuming his face from below as he blows on the flame. A monkey looks over his shoulder on one side, a bucktoothed taller man in profile, who may represent a slack-jawed yokel, on the other. The meaning of the image defies easy interpretation, although a label tells us it might have a moralistic message about folly and the idea that art can illuminate and “ape” nature. Yet the virtuosic light effects, while rooted in the work of the Venetian painter Tintoretto, look forward to the Baroque era’s naturalism and the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and his followers. And while the artist depicted the boy’s lit face with sharp definition, the sleeve of the bumpkin’s yellow coat, much closer to us, appears blurred, as if El Greco attempted the articulation of depth through varying focal planes, the soft-focus optical technique that Vermeer would use several decades hence, and that itself predicted the look of photography so much later. Beckoning across the centuries, El Greco’s vision remains compellingly contemporary.
—Joseph R. Wolin