El Greco exhibition… on hold

Prior to the world being put on hold due to Covid-19, The Art Institute of Chicago was due to show, perhaps to date, the most impressive El Greco exhibition. The retrospective was scheduled to be shown at only two places, the Grand Palais in Paris and the famed Chicago museum.

The exhibition’s aim was to distance El Greco from the stereotypes often attributed to the artist: mystical genius, early pioneer of Cubism and Expressionism, and ascetic lunatic. Rather, the hope was to place him within the context of his time, with a special focus placed on the notes he wrote on his copy of Giorgio Vasari “The Lives of the Artists.”

Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau, the current curator of Spanish painting at the Musée du Louvre said about the artist, “He was a learned artist, a real Renaissance man, and if we can help to shift the frame a bit, that would be great.”

El Greco was born Domenico Theotokopoulos in Crete in 1541. His initial apprenticeship was in the Byzantine tradition; following, he left for Venice and Rome to refine his training.

Spain, however, was where his art flourished and where he began to approach painting with his own unique style. For critics and admirers alike, El Greco has a unique place in the history of paintings as the last grand master of the Renaissance and the first great painter of the Golden Age. For many years, the artist was virtually forgotten about, but he was “rediscovered” in the late 19th-century by those who embraced his avant-garde style… and his originality that embraced both tradition and modernity.

El Greco was well known for his religious themes, even though many preserved him as a prolific portraitist. He was a master at capturing the character and personality of his subjects. His dramatic and expressionistic style was met with questions by his contemporaries… until he was appreciated in the 20th century. Regarded for painters as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism; this is similar to how words are a source of inspiration for poets and writers.

Modern scholars cannot characterize El Greco because his style is so individual. It is safe to say that he truly does not belong to any “conventional school.”

Even though El Greco was best known for tortuously elongated figures, he is considered to be the first landscape artist in the history of Spanish art. Similar to his human portrayals, El Greco approached landscapes in the same manner… drawing inspiration from reality but remaining separate from it. The artist invented scenes as a way to convey the emotions that he desired.

One of his most famous paintings also happens to be a landscape, “View of Toledo.” Depicted is a view of Toledo, the city where El Greco lived for most of his life. The landscape is painted in a dramatic manner with bright vegetation in the forefront and threatening clouds in the background. The city is depicted with grey tones and the buildings are painted in a “cloud-like” fashion.

The “imaginative language” of the paintings is often thought to have had  a direct influence on Expressionism. Both Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” from 1893 with the dramatic sky and clouds, and Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” from 1889 with the strange vegetation and pronounced skies, can be related back to El Greco’s viewpoint.

Following the Paris exhibition, our hometown of Chicago was scheduled to be the only other museum to present this year’s El Greco retrospective. The show features 57 works from across the world. In addition to a “timeline” of the development of El Greco’s unique style, the show was also meant to display the ambition that drove the artist to pursue astronomical success.

Strangely, the painter was not very popular in France where there are only ten of his paintings in the national collection. In addition, Museo del Prado, which owns 42 works from El Greco’s most prolific period in Spain, suspended all loans to international locations. To pull the show together, Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau, and her predecessor, Guillaume Kientz, set up a partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago loaned “The Assumption of the Virgin”, a monumental piece that is newly restored and measures more than 4 meters high. This painting has not been shown in Europe for over one hundred years. The last record of it on display was in 1904, when American industrialist Henry Osborne Havemeyer and his wife Louisine purchased it.

Rebecca Long, the Art Institute of Chicago’s associate curator of European painting and sculpture said of the retrospective, “The images themselves are so compelling,” Long said, “even if you don’t know the name of the artist. It’s the same reason people like Picasso are drawn to him. The work speaks for itself. It’s incredibly distinctive.”