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
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