El Greco, painter of alternative worlds (Feature)

El Greco broke away with the canons of painting and the treatment of 16th century religious figures by using colours differently and distorting perspective to the point that several experts consider him a creator of alternative worlds.

Some blame his peculiar way of painting to a problem of astigmatism (although medical studies say otherwise), and for others he is a precursor by whose work Manet, Cezanne, Picasso and Cubism, Kokoschka, Beckmann and surrealism, Orozco, Matta and Pollock were inspired, says Prensa Latina news agency.

To observe his elongated figures, sometimes sinuous, the treatment of light evoking abstract planes and the unorthodox approach to religious figures in which some have noticed an underlying eroticism, can attest to his significance in the 20th century.

That also explains that his work was almost forgotten three centuries after his death in 1614 in Toledo, Spain, where he lived his last and most controversial years, probably also most successful for the artist.

El Greco was born in 1541 as Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Crete and lived there the first 26 years of his life, when he was recognized as a master of icons, then 10 years in Italy (Venice and Rome) before arriving in 1577 in Toledo, about 80 km from Madrid.

This city, which adopted this Greek son and called him El Greco - the Greek - is paying tribute to him throughout 2014 on the 400th anniversary of his death. He had died April 7, 1614.

The historic city of Toledo, along with cities like Madrid and Valladolid will be hosting exhibitions and events in association with the El Greco 2014 Foundation to pay homage to the artist and his creative legacy.

One such exhibition brought together 125 of his paintings from more than 30 cities in 11 countries, the largest show of the genius ever organized.

Fernando Marias, curator of the exhibition, says that it was precisely in Toledo where the famous painter combined the influence of Byzantine art from his origins and Italian classicism in a kind of synthesiser dialectic to achieve his most transcendental work.

According to Marias, the intensity and saturation of his colours is comparable with his eloquence, and he left written reviews of his own work, also about Michelangelo and Tintoretto, which were written now on the walls of the exhibit.

Marias says that El Greco enjoyed painting beautiful things in a beautiful way. Neither emaciated saints nor blood: it is a San Francisco with no wounds of stigma, it is the beauty of the divinities against the position of the church of his time.

In Marias's opinion, angels, cherubim and seraphim of El Greco's work seem made of another material. He crosses the line with regard to nudity allowed in his time, and brings eroticism and sexuality to the churches, he says.

During the 16th century, the details of the pictures were also criticised because they are elements that distract from the essential: the prayers.

Marias describes El Greco as the kind of artist "bee" in comparison to those he defines as "silkworm" that live immersed in their own world.

El Greco absorbed prints and paintings and then he distills them as they were of his own, the same way bees make their honey, he says.

Another creator of worlds, the Spanish Pablo Picasso, studied El Greco's work in detail, as stated in 1946 by Francisco Bernareggi, an Argentine friend of his time in Madrid: "Because Picasso and I copied El Greco in El Prado, some people were shocked and they called us modernist... That was in 1897, when El Greco was a threat." In 1899, Picasso signed an apparent self-portrait as "I, El Greco."

Curiously enough, this is a painter who died 400 years ago and was rescued by the avant-garde painting just a century ago, a misunderstood and reviled genius who perhaps was ahead of his time.

Toledo and Spain retake now the worlds of El Greco as the pinnacle of a rare artistic and historical revaluation and a work that continues impressing and amazing four centuries later.

--IANS/Prensa Latina

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