ART REVIEW; El Greco, Richly Repeating Himself

By ROBERTA SMITH on May 25, 2001

DESPITE the impressive gowns, does the Jacqueline Kennedy show at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art ultimately strike you as bland and sentimental? On a
more substantial note, do Frank Gehry's beautiful architectural models at the
Guggenheim Museum sometimes seem a bit overbearing and overwrought? If so,
you may need a little more old-fashioned art and a little less spectacle and
commerce 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. Like
the Museum of Modern Art's recent single-digit van Gogh exhibition, it proves that
brevity is not only the soul of wit. At the Frick, it is also the soul of intense visual
concentration, blissful savoring and a sense of artistic growth so compressed that it
can make the air crackle.

The show includes four versions of ''The Purification of the Temple,'' which
together span 44 years and provide a vivid timeline of this artist's development, and
three of the five attributable versions of his resonant portrait of St. Jerome as a
cardinal. It highlights El Greco's habit of repeating a single motif on different-size
canvases with minimal adjustments. The exhibition makes its small oval gallery
reverberate with ideas about painting: as craft, thought, commodity and lifelong
quest.

El Greco is one of those great, irresistible first-love painters, the kind you fall for in
your 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 in
elongated, unanchored figures; misty-eyed, mooning faces; jagged patches of color;
flickering lights and darks; indeterminate spaces; and forthright paint handling. He
is among the first of Western painting's eccentric loners, a line known for taking
liberties with paint and image that includes van Gogh, Ryder, Ensor, Soutine and
Philip Guston.

But Western painting is only one element in El Greco's achievement, which is an

astounding transcultural assimilation, forged on the anvil of an unusually strong
personality. Arrogance is often cited as his most salient characteristic, with
litigiousness, which cost him royal and church patronage and made him dependent
on private patrons, a close second.

His habit of repetition reflects, in part, his need to meet the demands of those
clients. 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 Byzantine
culture -- icons were perceived less as images of holy beings than as holy beings
themselves. 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 briefly
employed in Titian's workshop, and where he soaked up further lessons about
color and brushwork from the examples of Tintoretto and Veronese. Then it was on
to Rome and the influences of Michelangelo and Raphael. Seven years later, having
alienated a crucial patron, he moved to Spain; in 1577 he settled in Toledo, where
he eventually established a busy workshop of his own and died in 1614.

In addition to three cultures and countries, El Greco's career spanned two

apprenticeships, numerous stylistic phases, at least two faiths and several artistic
and intellectual milieus.

His oeuvre was neglected by scholars until the late 19th century, but since then it
has served so many different art historical agendas that its shifting lines of
argument and interpretations make the machinations of the field itself unusually
clear.

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 Spanish
painting (the founder of the Spanish school); an Italian, possibly Mannerist,
master; and, from the Greek viewpoint, as the last and one of the greatest
Byzantine icon painters. Different factions of the early modernists embraced him
as a precursor: as proto-Expressionist, proto-Cubist (Picasso), proto-abstract and
the 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 stubborn
was the myth of El Greco's astigmatism -- that he painted the world as he actually
saw it -- leading at least one art historian to note that in that case all his patrons in
Toledo must have had it, too.

To some art historians, El Greco is the interpreter of an inward-turning mysticism

that 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 16th
century 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 stagecraft
depicting a vengeful Jesus slashing his way through a roiling crowd, driving the
money-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 Greco
tentatively approaching the innovations of the high Renaissance, passing through
its influences and then out the other side. He discards its ideals and retrieves some
of the expressive, abstracting tendencies of Byzantine art, molding them into a
personal, idiosyncratic style.

To see these paintings together is a little like attending the same play performed by
a succession of increasingly impressive actors. There are changes everywhere -- in
the setting, the props and the roles of the minor players, as well as in the intensity
and tone of the central action. This action radiates from the figure of Jesus, about to
bring 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 novice

who 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 body
appearing to occupy a completely different spatial plane from the upper half. The
foreground is cluttered with an array of endearing but distracting details: a large
basket of fresh rolls, a cage of pigeons in the care of a reclining woman, two rabbits
sniffing a bag of spilled and broken oysters, and a hog-tied lamb, a symbol of the
Eucharist. What may be a money box teeters precariously on a step, a clumsy
attempt 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 confident
command of the basics as well as attention to Michelangelo's ''Last
Judgment'' (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 flattens
dramatically against his body, as if from the power of Jesus' anger. The foreground
has 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 right
corner who are thought to represent Titian; Michelangelo; Giulio Clovio, a
Croatian-born painter who urged El Greco to come to Rome; and either Raphael or
Correggio. And on the arch in the background, the putti have given way to little
reliefs of biblical scenes that echo the Purification: the expulsion from the Garden
of Eden and the story of Abraham and Isaac.

The third version, which belongs to the Frick, resurrects the purification theme
after a quarter of a century. Painted in Toledo about 1600, it reflects El Greco's
arrival 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 being
performed 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 the
figure of a dapper courtier and carries a little wine jug.
In this version, vengeance is undercut by gentleness, expressed most overtly by the
fluttering delicacy of the many gesturing hands. In particular, Jesus' right hand,
previously barely noticeable at his side, can now be seen just above the raised hand
of a fallen man, as if in blessing. The woman and the crate of pigeons, stage left,
have been written out of the script, replaced by a wonderful bent-over figure of a
man in a copper-colored tunic who struggles with a heavy box, perhaps of money,
and who will probably remain unblessed.

The fourth painting, created in 1610-14, clearly takes the third as a model, but its
many modifications indicate an artist continually rethinking even his most familiar
compositions. The setting is now a closed interior, which makes the space more
charged. A reeling figure in red, heavily brushed with white, intensifies the
agitation at the painting's left edge. The scene of the expulsion from the Garden of
Eden is now a tiny plaque below a niche that contains a full-size male nude. It
suggests a Greek statue of the Classical period, subjected to El Greco's indelible
wavering style.

Across from the ''Purification'' paintings are the three portraits of St. Jerome as a
stern, hypersensitive maroon-robed cardinal, all painted in Toledo after 1590.
Rather than a pattern of evolution, the portraits tell a tale of deliberate repetition --
the Frick's is the original -- probably for the sake of private clients. The differences
here are more subtle, more about nuances of color, psychology and paint handling
and more about connoisseurship than iconography or structure. But again, they
reflect the painter's ability to copy himself yet do it differently each time.

The portraits represent not only the deepening mysticism of El Greco's late work,
but also his ability to adjust his distorting style to the creation of a distinct,
imposing individual personality. Divested of his usual study, books and lion, St.
Jerome looks up from his Bible with penetrating intelligence and slightly weary
skepticism.

In his catalog essay, Mr. Brown, the art historian, suggests that El Greco may have
identified with Jerome, quoting a description of this saint as ''a displaced loner
whose ties with the ecclesiastical hierarchy were irregular and often turbulent.'' Mr.
Brown also notes that El Greco was able to undermine the Renaissance system of
artistic representation because, as an outsider, ''he never fully believed in it.''

In El Greco scholarship, the attention to the artist's Byzantine phase is on the rise.
His career has an interesting parallel in the story of another proud, truculent non-
European painter: the Abstract Expressionist Arshile Gorky, who came from
Armenia to New York and transformed an established style, Cubism, into a
personal vocabulary haunted by memories of Byzantine icons. Like El Greco's,
Gorky's origins are the subject of new scrutiny, further eroding the splendid
isolation of the history of Western painting.