Word: grecos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
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...
...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...
...might say, was the dissolution of matter into energy under extreme stress. He did not approach this by some corny process of finding painted "equivalents" for Einstein, like so many pseudo artists of his time. Rather, he looked back into tradition, past his teacher Thomas Hart Benton, to El Greco and, with somewhat less understanding, to Michelangelo...
Pollock's early work is permeated by the forms of mannerist contrapposto, the serpentine figures of 16th century art, and there is more than just an echo of the strange excavated space of El Greco's paintings, simultaneously vast and womblike, in his work after 1947. Because of his aspirations to sublimity, it is difficult to assimilate Pollock-as some authorities have wished to do-to the traditions of the School of Paris. The French painter he most admired, the surrealist André Masson, was set against the pre-eminently French virtues of lucidity, calm...