El Greco: My Big, Skinny Greek Painting

The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception

Tokyo seems crowded with Old Masters these days. Rubens is at the Bunkamura; Raphael is at the National Museum of Western Art; while the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art belongs to El Greco (“The Greek”), real name Domenikos Theotokopoulos.

The subject matter of these classic painters was essentially Christian religious themes intercut with Greek or Roman legends. Rubens veered towards the latter, while the driving force in the art of Raphael and El Greco was Biblical iconography. But, of the two, El Greco comes across as much more sincere and religiously inspired. This, as well as the superiority of the selection, makes the exhibition at the Met the ideal show for the Easter period.

In contrast to most of the Old Masters, El Greco eschewed over-subtle shadings and gradations and went instead for strong, emotive colors and highly stylized forms, often giving his work a stretched, elongated appearance.

A Lady in a Fur Wrap

It is this that gives his art its impact, and is also the reason it later fell into disfavor as European artistic taste in the following centuries became more fussy and refined. In 1724 Antonio Palomino, a Spanish Baroque painter remarked, “We can define El Greco’s work by saying that what he did well none did better, and that what he did badly none did worse.”

Such ambivalence was blown away at the start of the 20th century when a more coloristic approach to painting led to a revival in his reputation.

Often when a big art name shows up in Japan, what you get are a couple of reasonably well-known works, padded out with lots of substandard pieces: half-finished studies, doodles, paintings by a friend-of-a-friend’s second cousin, etc. But this time, El Greco isn’t just a brand name fronting a pile of scrapings from the storeroom.

The show brings 50 oil paintings to Japan, including his only known portrait of a woman, A Lady in a Fur Wrap (1577-90).

Another excellent work, and one that has added resonance from the recent shenanigans of the banking sector, is Christ Driving the Money Lenders from the Temple (c.1600). This shows Christ in uncharacteristically kung-fu mode, using force to evict the financiers of his day from the sacred precincts.

The work also shows the skill with which El Greco could capture dynamism and movement, as does the exhibition’s centerpiece, The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (1607-13). This vertical, soaring canvas shows a lot more movement than any normal conception! In it, the Virgin Mary flies up into an apparently storm-tossed sky, surrounded by angels and cherubim, as the Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove fluttering above her head.

C.B.Liddell
Metropolis
18th March, 2013