Art: El Greco's Arrogant Genius

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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.