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ART REVIEW; El Greco, Richly Repeating Himself By ROBERTA SMITH on May 25, 2001DESPITE the impressive gowns, does the Jacqueline Kennedy show at theMetropolitan Museum of Art ultimately strike you as bland and sentimental? On amore substantial note, do Frank Gehry's beautiful architectural models at theGuggenheim Museum sometimes seem a bit overbearing and overwrought? If so,you may need a little more old-fashioned art and a little less spectacle andcommerce in your museum experience.Consider, as an antidote, the Frick Collection's small gemlike exhibition of the 16th-century Greek-born and Italian-trained Spanish painter, El Greco.''El Greco: Themes and Variations,'' organized by the art historian Jonathan Brown,consists of just seven canvases, most of them seen together for the first time. Likethe Museum of Modern Art's recent single-digit van Gogh exhibition, it proves thatbrevity is not only the soul of wit. At the Frick, it is also the soul of intense visualconcentration, blissful savoring and a sense of artistic growth so compressed that itcan make the air crackle.The show includes four versions of ''The Purification of the Temple,'' whichtogether span 44 years and provide a vivid timeline of this artist's development, andthree of the five attributable versions of his resonant portrait of St. Jerome as acardinal. It highlights El Greco's habit of repeating a single motif on different-sizecanvases with minimal adjustments. The exhibition makes its small oval galleryreverberate with ideas about painting: as craft, thought, commodity and lifelongquest.El Greco is one of those great, irresistible first-love painters, the kind you fall for inyour aesthetic youth, when painting is still a new experience. His best-known work radiates emotion with a complexity that is all on the surface, expressed inelongated, unanchored figures; misty-eyed, mooning faces; jagged patches of color;flickering lights and darks; indeterminate spaces; and forthright paint handling. Heis among the first of Western painting's eccentric loners, a line known for takingliberties with paint and image that includes van Gogh, Ryder, Ensor, Soutine andPhilip Guston.But Western painting is only one element in El Greco's achievement, which is anastounding transcultural assimilation, forged on the anvil of an unusually strongpersonality. Arrogance is often cited as his most salient characteristic, withlitigiousness, which cost him royal and church patronage and made him dependenton private patrons, a close second.His habit of repetition reflects, in part, his need to meet the demands of thoseclients. It is also a result of his early training as a Byzantine icon painter on Crete,then a Venetian colony, where he was born in 1541 and lived until he immigrated to

Venice in 1567. In Byzantine culture -- even late Venetian-influenced Byzantineculture -- icons were perceived less as images of holy beings than as holy beingsthemselves. Repetition was not a stylistic tic but an article of faith.El Greco spent three years in Venice, where he is thought to have been brieflyemployed in Titian's workshop, and where he soaked up further lessons aboutcolor and brushwork from the examples of Tintoretto and Veronese. Then it was onto Rome and the influences of Michelangelo and Raphael. Seven years later, havingalienated a crucial patron, he moved to Spain; in 1577 he settled in Toledo, wherehe eventually established a busy workshop of his own and died in 1614.In addition to three cultures and countries, El Greco's career spanned twoapprenticeships, numerous stylistic phases, at least two faiths and several artisticand intellectual milieus.His oeuvre was neglected by scholars until the late 19th century, but since then ithas served so many different art historical agendas that its shifting lines of argument and interpretations make the machinations of the field itself unusuallyclear.With the rise of European nationalism in the first three decades of the 20th century,conflicting claims were made for his importance as an exemplar of Spanishpainting (the founder of the Spanish school); an Italian, possibly Mannerist,master; and, from the Greek viewpoint, as the last and one of the greatestByzantine icon painters. Different factions of the early modernists embraced himas a precursor: as proto-Expressionist, proto-Cubist (Picasso), proto-abstract andthe first ''pure painter'' (in the words of the art critic Roger Fry).Explanations for the distortions in his images of figures have included madness,social deviance (a euphemism for homosexuality) and hashish. Especially stubbornwas the myth of El Greco's astigmatism -- that he painted the world as he actuallysaw it -- leading at least one art historian to note that in that case all his patrons inToledo must have had it, too.To some art historians, El Greco is the interpreter of an inward-turning mysticismthat sprang up in Toledo during his lifetime and that emphasized private prayer.For others he remains the quintessential painter of a more public-minded Counter-Reformation ideology.Indeed, the theme of the purification of the temple became popular in the 16thcentury as a metaphor for Roman Catholicism's struggle against the heresy of Martin Luther and his followers. El Greco's version is a tumultuous bit of stagecraftdepicting a vengeful Jesus slashing his way through a roiling crowd, driving themoney-changers and sundry merchants from God's house.At the Frick, the four ''Purification'' paintings are lined up on a single wall and can

be taken in with a simple turn of the head. Essentially, they show El Grecotentatively approaching the innovations of the high Renaissance, passing throughits influences and then out the other side. He discards its ideals and retrieves someof the expressive, abstracting tendencies of Byzantine art, molding them into apersonal, idiosyncratic style.To see these paintings together is a little like attending the same play performed bya succession of increasingly impressive actors. There are changes everywhere -- inthe setting, the props and the roles of the minor players, as well as in the intensityand tone of the central action. This action radiates from the figure of Jesus, about tobring down a raised whip on a terrified male figure seen from the back; the man,whose robe has fallen from his shoulders, lifts his arm in self-protection.In the first version, painted in 1567-70 in Venice, El Greco is a struggling novicewho musters his figures into a congealed, darkly mottled mass. The cowering figure-- call him the First Terrified Man -- seems split in two, the lower half of his bodyappearing to occupy a completely different spatial plane from the upper half. Theforeground is cluttered with an array of endearing but distracting details: a largebasket of fresh rolls, a cage of pigeons in the care of a reclining woman, two rabbitssniffing a bag of spilled and broken oysters, and a hog-tied lamb, a symbol of theEucharist. What may be a money box teeters precariously on a step, a clumsyattempt at spatial illusion. Statues of putti look down from niches on either side of an arch.The second painting, done in Rome a few years later, demonstrates a confidentcommand of the basics as well as attention to Michelangelo's ''LastJudgment'' (especially in the figure of Jesus) and to Raphael's ''School of Athens.''The body of the First Terrified Man is now in one piece, and his robe flattensdramatically against his body, as if from the power of Jesus' anger. The foregroundhas been swept clear. (The lamb of the first painting reappears in two versions of El Greco's ''Adoration of the Shepherds,'' now hanging in the Met.)The oddity here is a little show of thanks: four onlookers inserted in the lower rightcorner who are thought to represent Titian; Michelangelo; Giulio Clovio, aCroatian-born painter who urged El Greco to come to Rome; and either Raphael orCorreggio. And on the arch in the background, the putti have given way to littlereliefs of biblical scenes that echo the Purification: the expulsion from the Gardenof Eden and the story of Abraham and Isaac.The third version, which belongs to the Frick, resurrects the purification themeafter a quarter of a century. Painted in Toledo about 1600, it reflects El Greco'sarrival at a personal style and the birth of his signature tall, slimmed-down figures.The scene has an eerie sense of silence and suspension, as if it were beingperformed in slow motion. Elegance prevails: for example, a man at the far left of the painting, pudgy and hefting a barrel in the previous versions, now cuts thefigure of a dapper courtier and carries a little wine jug.