EL GRECO is an anomaly. He was the most extremely mannered of Mannerist painters–yet he lived outside that tradition, having merely bumped into it in Italy on his way from Greece to Spain. He learned to paint icons in the outmoded fashion of a dying empire, and he adapted it to the needs of a different empire that was just beginning. He advanced a tradition of art–the Venetian school–to its high-water mark, but the artists of that tradition would never know it and would not much have liked it if they had. He was admired in the Spain of his time but then quickly faded into cultural invisibility, a part of its ecclesiastic fabric like the stonework of the churches’ walls, only to bloom again as eyes quickened by the Impressionists and Cubists saw him in a new–and incandescent–light. He became the twentieth century’s quintessential modern Old Master. El Greco’s thrones and dominions are visiting the Metropolitan Museum in New York through January 11. But how different they seem. Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a story about a man named Pierre Menard who was rewriting “Don Quixote”–word-for-word identical to Cervantes’s novel, but utterly different because Menard is writing as our contemporary.
The El Greco at the Metropolitan is the painterly equivalent of Pierre Menard: not really the Greek-Venetian-Spanish genius who worked from 1570 to 1610, but a modern painter who has been to school with the Fauves, the Cubists, and the Blue Rider group. Torn from their intended context, where they were meant to provoke an eight-cylinder reverence, the paintings provide a genuine aesthetic pleasure. But for El Greco and his patrons (almost always the Church), such pleasure was just a secondary effect–like the euphoria produced by morphine in a man undergoing surgery.
Now, in a strange New World beyond his blue horizon, bathed in a light that rather dims his peculiar fires (as a candle flame vanishes in sunlight), he is ours to enjoy and misunderstand. Although not altogether, for the exhibition includes a whole room of his portraits, which are not so different from those executed by, say, Titian. The exception, from the Met’s own collection, is the menacing figure of Cardinal Guevara, Spain’s Grand Inquisitor, glaring at us through black spectacles, his left hand clawing the arm of his throne.
That portrait is as near as El Greco lets the real world trespass on his private property, where only saints and angels dare to spread their wings. None of them “tread,” for in El Greco’s realm, gravity is an on-again-off-again law. Prayer exerts a buoyant force, and faith quivers all the draperies. Clouds roil and lightning flashes, and the light comes directly from the painter’s brush. From his brief glimpses of Caravaggio, El Greco had learned how to chiaroscurize a tableau so that it would haunt its appointed gloom in some chapel, ready to leap forth as the viewer drew near, like the specters in an amusement park’s tunnel of horrors.
If that seems to lack the decorum of “Fine Art,” such was El Greco’s intention, as it was the intention of the Church during the Counter-Reformation. Heaven was not all blue skies and angel choirs. El Greco is the patron saint of psychedelia and glorious excess, of Rilke’s beauty that “we can barely endure” and that we worship because (like that Inquisitor) “it serenely disdains to destroy us.”
His vision is sweetened a bit by the Church’s assurance that there is sound dogma behind these tumbled draperies and elastic limbs. But imagine coming upon the paintings outside the assuring context of a church or a museum, as though they’d been painted on the cave walls of Lascaux. (That is not too farfetched a fancy, for El Greco often throws in a boulder at the bottom of a picture, as a foil to his black skies.) With their expressive distortions, flashes of nudity, and dream-like evocations of flight, they are as trippy as painting gets. Michelangelo and Raphael, by comparison, are garden gnomes: muscle-bound, earthbound, physical. El Greco is nothing if not metaphysical.
The sheer number of El Grecos the Met has amassed for this exhibition is a testimony to the power and the glory of the dollar, and even if you don’t like El Greco (and many art lovers cringe at the name) you shouldn’t miss the chance to see it while it’s here. A trip to Madrid, Toledo, and the Escorial would cost at least a couple thousand more, and there you would not have the Met’s demystifying, high-wattage light.
BE WARNED that if you go to see El Greco, you should probably take in the exhibition of Sanford R. Gifford’s landscapes, also showing at the Met (through February 8). Gifford is as quiet a painter as El Greco is loud, and his work is as lacking in variety as the most austere vegetarian restaurant. Of few other painters would it be as true to claim that if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. That one is gorgeous, and I’d love a Sanford Gifford I could call my own, but seventy? I haven’t that large an appetite.
In some ways Gifford is harder to view empathetically than El Greco, simply because there is nothing in his life and little in his work to excite curiosity. He is a man without a myth. Born in 1823 into a prosperous New York family, he left school at twenty-one to study painting, exhibited his first work at twenty-four, was celebrated, and continued painting to his death at age fifty-seven. He got to Europe a few times, but it didn’t make much of a dent.
Early and late he painted in the approved style of the Hudson River School: lucid luminous landscapes featuring distant vistas of lavender skies and peace in the valley. No other painter of the Hudson River School can boast so pervasive and genteel a calm. Even Gifford’s sunsets are muted. The human figure is usually absent or tucked away in a corner to represent the lucky onlooker: The art trade, then as now, preferred its landscapes unpopulated. If Gifford had one signature peculiarity it is width. He loves a canvas of CinemaScope, or wider, proportions, the better to stretch his horizons (invariably just a little below dead center) into something like a diorama. Only the most baronial of halls could have accommodated canvases on such a scale, but apparently there are still enough baronial halls in this postmodern world for a good part of the pictures on view to have come from private collections. Without belonging to a family with old money, you’re unlucky to see these paintings again any time soon.
THE MET’S THIRD ART EVENT of the new season is the one most likely to be a great entertainment: the drably entitled “Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism.” In the pre-Chunnel era, crossing the English Channel was never a lot of fun and often enough an ordeal, for which the mascot painting of this show–Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa”–provides a suitable emblem: the luckless, starving, half-naked survivors waving their underwear at their far-off rescuers in what has to be the plumiest, most melodramatic potboiler this side of the Sistine Chapel.
Things had changed by the time of Géricault. David and other painters of the Napoleonic court insisted on neo-classic decorum and dignity, which meant that only Christian martyrs and Greek warriors could suffer visibly in their paintings. Further, skies were to be blue, as in the bright paintings of the Renaissance, and compositions balanced like a butcher’s scales.
These restrictions were theoretically indefensible and even, for a painter, counterintuitive, and so it is hard for modern eyes to see these paintings as defying convention in any way. If anything they seem conservative, not to say fusty, and their pleasures derive from that very fact. We can relax into these storybook dioramas and halcyon landscapes as into a plush sofa, forgetting the scolds who want art to “challenge” us. We sail away into the lurid cloudscapes of Paul Huet or wet our mental toes in Bonington’s beachside “Fishmarket Near Boulogne.”
Richard Bonington was the John Keats of English painting, an artist of prodigious and precocious gifts who died young–but not before, as this show attests, he’d made his mark on both sides of the English Channel.
English-speaking peoples are so used to thinking of France, and Paris especially, as being the source of high art for the last two hundred years that it comes as a shock to realize that in the 1820s and 1830s the debt ran in the opposite direction. The passion that had sprung up in England for watercolors spread to the French and helped them loosen up. The English example was essential to the lighter palette and livelier brushwork of Impressionism. Even Constable and Turner, who seem to us landscapists of a heroic order, had lessons for the French: Landscapes need not have the Arcadian patina of a Claude Lorrain; they could show ordinary farms (like Constable’s lushly rustic “The White Horse” from the Frick) and seas raging like King Lear (John Marin’s “Deluge,” on a visit from Yale).
Not every Romantic exercise in terribilità was a success; some were just terrible, and Delacroix provides prime instances of both extremes, with a wonderful over-the-top version of his tribute to Byron’s “Sardanapalus” (which looks like Géricault’s turbulent “Medusa” transported to a harem) and a perfectly silly watercolor illustration to Scott’s “Bride of Lammermoor,” with a topless Lucy bug-eyed beside the husband she has slain, both of them as anatomically incorrect as anyone in a Dick Tracy comic strip.
The pleasure of seeing good painters illustrate classic literature is almost lost to us today, and “Crossing the Channel” is a reminder of what has been lost by the proscription of imagery from literature and history. There is a great big murky Delacroix from the Philadelphia Museum that shows a scene from my favorite Gothic novel, “Melmoth the Wanderer,” and two small oils by Bonington illustrating “Quentin Durward” and Goethe’s first tragedy, “Goetz von Berlichingen.” Bonington’s Goetz is a swarthy man in full armor–and a flashy skirt of what looks like gold lamé.
That mix of gorgeous color, high seriousness, and inadvertent silliness keeps one a little off-balance all the way through the show, as though one were traversing a spinning barrel at a fairgrounds. The crowds who flocked to the Guggenheim to witness similar hijinks performed by Matthew Barney should be able to take “Crossing the Channel” in their stride if only they allow themselves to appreciate the bravura of oil painting.
Think of it as transgressive, and you can have a guiltless good time. Or think of it as a night at the opera or the ballet, where the grand manner has never fallen into disgrace. Where, indeed, the same thundering good tales from Goethe, Scott, and Shakespeare still shiver our timbers and tingle our spines.
Thomas M. Disch is a poet, novelist, and art critic.
