El Greco at the Grand Palais

First, I have something to confess. Before even going in, I was really prejudiced because this painter was definitely not one of my favorites.

And so, when I came out…My opinion was confirmed (with one exception I’ll tell you about).

Because to my eyes — so immersed in classical culture, as classical as you can get — El Greco has a serious strike against him, being the purest heir of Byzantine art (he actually started as an icon painter).

We know that Byzantine art was frozen in its form that had always been the same since the time of the Eastern Roman Empire.

To this day, the artisan workshops and artists of the Orthodox area still keep to the same themes and forms of the icons that their colleagues used centuries ago.

Of course, this has nothing to do with artistic skills, being about religion.

For Orthodox countries, representing the sacred has the sole purpose of evoking the spiritual impetus to carry the faithful into intimacy with images, such as the Virgin Mary.According to this principle, changing the “style” of a painting makes no sense.

The opposite is true of Western art.

After the human and cultural catastrophe of the fall of the Roman Empire, from Giotto on, art developed at a dizzying speed.

 

The Western artist seems in the grip of an irrepressible need to keep on evolving, changing, and inventing new approaches and styles almost every generation.

Is this a good thing? Considering the direction that Western contemporary art has gone, I have very serious doubts about it.

I’ll end my digression there, and let’s get back to our exhibition.

Visiting the exhibition, we realize how hard it is for a painter who started as Byzantine to establish himself in the sophisticated worlds of 16th-century Venice and Rome.

There is good reason that he made his name in Toledo where he had failed in Italy, i.e. getting commissions from royal families.

El Greco’s style and color would owe a great deal to his time in Italy.

In Venice, he learned the use of color from his teachers Titian and Tintoretto. And the invention of new classicist forms came out of seeing Roman masterpieces by Michelangelo and Raphael.

Looking at the paintings in the exhibition, I kept on getting the feeling that our artist was held back in his creations, as if something was keeping his instinct in check.

I know nothing about El Greco’s story, and the exhibition panels offered no help, but I think this aspect has to do with the realm of religious denomination.

All the paintings exhibited are religious. Could it be that our artist had an issue in this area?

Maybe he was a non-believer?

Or maybe he was in conflict with his consciousness because he was of the Orthodox faith? Who knows?

But can we really dismiss El Greco’s art just like that? No, definitely not.

There’s a piece at the end of that exhibition – as I mentioned at the start of this post – that had the effect of a lightning bolt piercing the dark.

The painting is titled The Opening of the Fifth Seal (see photo below) refers to a passage from the Apocalypse of St. John. Indeed, this painting is truly “apocalyptic” in its incredible modernity.

It is like looking at a 20th-century avant-garde painting, like one from Cezanne or Pablo Picasso.

Perhaps here we can finally glean El Greco’s true art, freed from all restraints.

El Greco

Grand Palais

3 Avenue du Général Eisenhower

from October 16, 2019 to February 10, 2020

75008 Paris