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Lifestyle 15
TUESDAY, APRIL 14, 2020
Arts
Sebastian Smee
THE WASHINGTON POST - The idea
that great art is timeless is a inepiece
of rhetoric. But it’s demonstrably
false. Art, like any object, exists
within history. It becomes most
interesting when it is most urgently
contemporary. Great art either
matters to you - to me, to us, right
here, right now - or it doesn’t.
Recognising this, I’ve found,
can be fruitful - and in unexpected
ways. Far from lessening my
curiosity about the past reception
of art, it deepens my fascination. It
makes me crave to know the ways
in which the art in our museums
felt contemporary (ie vital, a going
concern, a solace, a stimulant) to
other artists I love.
What different things - because
they must have been different! -
did Francis Bacon, John Singer
Sargent and Édouard Manet get
out of Velazquez? What did the
Impressionists Berthe Morisot and
Renoir see in the Rococo painters
Watteau and Fragonard? What did
Matisse extract from Giotto?
If you want to understand how
an old master can, centuries later,
become suddenly and urgently
relevant, it’s fun to think about El
Greco (1541–1614). Born Domenikos
Theotokopoulos, El Greco came
from Crete to Toledo, Spain, via
Italy. A leading light of the Spanish
Renaissance, he was the subject of
amagni icent show I saw last year at
the Grand Palais in Paris. Organised
by the Kimbell Art Museum’s
Guillaume Kientz, it arrived at the
Art Institute of Chicago just as
COVID–19 shuttered the museum.
Apity: El Greco’s paintings could
be useful to us now. Though their
spaces are shallow, at times almost
claustrophobic, they hold out the
promise of deep compassion, a dark
and watery-eyed mood that seems
Why El Greco inspired so many great modern artists
to licker in and out, keyed to the
pulse of life and its two constants:
change and mortality.
El Greco, as the name suggests,
was an outsider. Ambitious, intelli-
gent, as apparently mutable as the
bodies he shaped, he began his
career painting icons in the byzan-
tine style. Upon leaving Crete (then
under Venetian rule) for mainland
Italy, he set himself the modest task
of “correcting” Michelangelo (who
had died three years earlier). He
had harsh words, too, for Leonardo
da Vinci.
It’s fair to say that El Greco
sought to unite the colour and touch
of Venetian-style oil painting with
Michelangelo’s kinetic, questing,
spirit-convulsed bodies in complex
space. But then, that would be fair
to say of many late-16th-Century
painters - Tintoretto, for instance. It
doesn’t tell us why El Greco looks so
different from everyone else, or why
he called out so urgently to artists in
the late-19th and early-20th centuries.
“El Greco’s great merit,” wrote
the Impressionist Mary Cassatt,
in 1903, to her friend Louisine
Havemeyer, “is that he was two
centuries ahead of his time; that is
why painters, Manet among them,
thought so much of him.”
We know what Cassatt meant.
But it is not “a great merit” to be
“ahead of one’s time,” nor is it
actually possible. No one believes
that El Greco was a prophet, that
he foresaw industrialisation, the
invention of photography or the
rise of modernity, and painted
accordingly. Yet something about
his work clearly spoke to artists
living in those new circumstances.
What was it?
Cassatt’s friend Edgar Degas
was one of the earliest modern
champions of El Greco. In the 1890s,
he acquired two El Greco paintings
for his collection (one is now in the
National Gallery of Art, the other
in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts).
His friend Henri Rouart wrote to
congratulate him on the purchase of
the painting now in Boston. El Greco,
Rouart said, was “incomparable, the
most beautiful of all. ... In terms of
feeling and enveloping colour no
one has taken it further.”
Unloved in Italy, El Greco settled
in Toledo, Spain. And of course,
the modern artist most famously
under El Greco’s spell was himself
a Spaniard: Pablo Picasso.
Without El Greco, Picasso’s early
Blue and Rose periods are hard to
imagine.UponseeingPicasso’swork
in Barcelona in 1900, one observer
saw evidence of “a kind of inspired
fever reminiscent of the best works
of El Greco and Goya, the only
indisputable masters or divinities
for Picasso.” In 1919, another
Picasso watcher, Roger Allard,
observed that “the intertwined
bodies in (Picasso’s) pictures of the
Blue Period have the sickly, tortured
air of El Greco igures.” And in his
Picasso biography, John Richardson
showed how El Greco’s Vision of
Saint John (in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art) played a major
role in the conception of Picasso’s
breakthrough masterpiece The
Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Picasso himself said that what
he most liked about El Greco’s
work were the portraits, “all those
gentlemen with pointed beards.”
And yet El Greco’s in luence on
him went far deeper. Compare,
for instance, Picasso’s famous Boy
Leading a Horse, in the Museum of
Modern Art, with El Greco’s Saint
Martin and the Beggar, at the Na-
tional Gallery. You can see connec-
tions in the attenuated forms, the
shallow space, even the way the
paint was applied. But it had to do,
inally, with feeling: frailty, suffer-
ing, stripped-back vulnerability.
Many of El Greco’s best works
ended up in American museums.
Philip Kennicott
THE WASHINGTON POST - For
weeks, we have seen the same
image of the coronavirus, a grey
sphere studded with red spikes that
looks like a forest of surrealist trees
growing on a dead planet. The ren-
dering was created by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) and can be downloaded from
its Public Health Image Library. The
spikes, which can also be seen when
the virus is looked at with an elec-
tron microscope, are what gives the
virus its characteristic corona.
But there’s a key difference be-
tween the CDC’s computer-graph-
ics image and a coronavirus seen
by the electron microscope, which
renders it as a grey blob with im-
perfectly spherical form and a dark
shadow around the characteristic
crown-shaped spiky covering. The
vivid red, which makes the digitised
virus look so threatening, isn’t there
Coronavirus is a killer, but this artist won’t reduce it to a cartoon villain
in real life. As David Goodsell, a pro-
fessor of computational biology at
the Scripps Research Institute and
research professor at Rutgers Uni-
versity, explained, the virus is small-
er than the wavelength of light, so it
doesn’t actually have colour.
The CDC’s image, he said, is
scrupulously faithful to what we
know now about the virus’ struc-
ture, but the red-and-grey colour
scheme is artistic licence.
Goodsell, 58, is also an artist
whose work focusses on making im-
ages of living cells at the molecular
level, and he has produced his own
watercolour of the coronavirus, with
his own invented colour scheme.
In Goodsell’s painting, the virus
is seen in cross section, not in the
round as in the CDC image, and
the colours resemble the vibrant,
jazzed-up earthiness of Arts and
Crafts-style wallpaper that was
fashionable in Victorian homes of
the late 19th Century. In Goodsell’s
painting, the characteristic spikes
are bright pink, the core of the vi-
rus, known as the nucleocapsid, is
lavender, and the whole is rendered
in a loral sea of green, orange and
brown mucous.
His image is strikingly beautiful,
whimsical and orderly, and it isn’t
hard to imagine it as a record cover
for a hippie rock band of the 1960s.
After releasing his image on Twit-
ter in February, he has thought a lot
about the idea of beauty, and the
scienti ic rendering of something
that much of the world now inds
uniquely terrifying.
“I am completely struggling
with this,” he said. “When I did this
painting, I didn’t think about it. I
did it in a colour scheme I’ve used
throughout my illustrations, to sep-
arate the different functional parts
of the image.”
His goal was to render, as ac-
curately as possible, all the known
details about the structure of the
virus, using a visual scheme that
draws on the simplifying line and
distillation of cartoon graphics for
greater intellectual clarity.
The National Gallery has seven, and
there are more paintings by him at
the Phillips Collection, Dumbarton
Oaks and the Walters Art Museum
in Baltimore. New York, too, has
great El Grecos, at the Metropolitan
and the Frick Collection, and there
are great examples of his work
in Boston, Chicago, Worcester,
Cleveland and Los Angeles, among
other places.
Almost all of these paintings
came to America in the early 20th
Century. At that time, according to
an article in the New York Times in
1912, “one collector after another
falls under the spell of that iery and
unequaled genius.”
But collectors were only
following the lead taken by artists.
Among the most in luential of these
(in part because he painted many
of their portraits) was John Singer
Sargent. Sargent loved Spain and,
as is well known, revered Diego
Velazquez. But he had also been
to Toledo and fallen in love with
El Greco. It was on his advice that
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
acquired its beautiful El Greco
portrait of the monk Fray Hortensio
Felix Paravicino.
‘A Boy Blowing on an Ember to Light a Candle (El Soplón)’ by El Greco.
PHOTO: THE WASHINGTON POST
In David Goodsell’s painting, the virus is seen in cross section.
PHOTO: THE WASHINGTON POST
No old master spoke more urgently to modern painters than El Greco.