|
El Greco (1541–1614) was a prominent painter, sculptor and architect active during the Spanish Renaissance. He developed into an artist so unique that he belongs to no conventional school. His dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but gained new found appreciation in the 20th century. He is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical pigmentation, marrying Byzantine traditions with those of Western civilization.〔M. Lambraki-Plaka, ''El Greco-The Greek'', 60〕 Of El Greco, Hortensio Félix Paravicino, a seventeenth-century Spanish preacher and poet, "Crete gave him life and the painter's craft, Toledo a better homeland, where through Death he began to achieve eternal life."〔L. Berg, (El Greco in Toledo )〕 According to author Liisa Berg, Paravacino revealed in a few words two main factors that define when a great artist gains the appraisal he deserves: no one is a prophet in his homeland and often it is in retrospect that one's work gains its true appreciation and value.〔 ==Re-evaluation of his art== El Greco was disdained by the immediate generations after his death because his work was opposed in many respects to the principles of the early baroque style which came to the fore near the beginning of the 17th century and soon supplanted the last surviving traits of the 16th-century Mannerism.〔 The painter was deemed incomprehensible and had no important followers〔M. Lambraki-Plaka, ''El Greco-The Greek'', 49〕 Only his son and a few unknown painters produced weak copies of El Greco's works. Later 17th- and early 18th-century Spanish commentators praised his skill but criticized his antinaturalistic style and his complex iconography. Some of these commentators, such as Antonio Palomino and Céan Bermúdez described his mature work as "contemptible", "ridiculous" and "worthy of scorn".〔Brown-Mann, ''Spanish Paintings'', 43 * E. Foundoulaki, ''From El Greco to Cézanne'', 100-101〕 The views of Palomino and Bermúdez were frequently repeated in Spanish historiography, adorned with terms such as "strange", "queer", "original", "eccentric" and "odd".〔E. Foundoulaki, ''From El Greco to Cézanne'', 100-101〕 The phrase "sunk in eccentricity", often encountered in such texts, in time became his "madness". With the arrival of Romantic sentiments, El Greco's works were examined anew.〔 To French writer Théophile Gautier, El Greco was the precursor of the European Romantic movement in all its craving for the strange and the extreme.〔J. Russel, (Seeing The Art Of El Greco As Never Before )〕 French Romantic writers praised his work for the same "extravagance" and "madness" which had disturbed 18th century commentators. During the operation of the Spanish Museum in Paris, El Greco was admired as the ideal romantic hero and all the romantic stereotypes (the gifted, the misunderstood, the marginal, the mad, the one who lost his reason because of the scorn of his contemporaries) were projected onto his life.〔 The myth of El Greco's madness came in two versions. On the one hand, Théophile Gautier, a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist and literary critic, believed that El Greco went mad from excessive artistic sensitivity.〔T. Gautier, ''Voyage en Espagne'', 217〕 On the other hand, the public and the critics would not possess the ideological criteria of Gautier and would retain the image of El Greco as a "mad painter" and, therefore, his "maddest" paintings were not admired but considered to be historical documents proving his "madness". The critic Zacharie Astruc and the scholar Paul Lefort helped to promote a widespread revival of interest in his painting. In the 1890s, Spanish painters then living in Paris adopted him as their guide and mentor.〔 In 1908, art historian Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, who regarded El Greco's style as a response to Spanish mystics, published the first comprehensive catalogue of El Greco's works.〔Brown-Mann, ''Spanish Paintings'', 43〕 In this book, El Greco is described as the founder of the Spanish School and as the conveyor of the Spanish soul.〔E. Foundoulaki, ''From El Greco to Cézanne'', 103〕 Julius Meier-Graefe, a scholar of French Impressionism, travelled in Spain in 1908 and wrote down his experiences in ''The Spanische Reise'', the first book which established El Greco as a great painter of the past. In El Greco's work, Meier-Graefe found foreshadowings of modernity.〔J.J. Sheehan, ''Museums in the German Art World'', 150〕 To the Der Blaue Reiter group in Munich in 1912, El Greco typified that ''mystical inner construction'' that it was the task of their generation to rediscover.〔 To the English artist and critic Roger Fry in 1920, El Greco was the archetypal genius who did as he thought best "with complete indifference to what effect the right expression might have on the public". Fry described El Greco as "an old master who is not merely modern, but actually appears a good many steps ahead of us, turning back to show us the way".〔M. Kimmelmann, (El Greco, Bearer Of Many Gifts )〕 At the same period, some other researchers developed certain disputed theories. Doctors August Goldschmidt and Germán Beritens argued that El Greco painted such elongated human figures because he had vision problems (possibly progressive astigmatism or strabismus) that made him see bodies longer than they were, and at an angle to the perpendicular. This theory enjoyed surprising popularity during the early years of the twentieth century and was opposed by the German psychologist David Kuntz.〔R.M. Helm, ''The Neoplatonic Tradition in the Art of El Greco'', 93-94 * M. Tazartes, ''El Greco'', 68-69〕 Whether or not El Greco had progressive astigmatism is still open to debate.〔I. Grierson, ''The Eye Book'', 115〕 Stuart Anstis, Professor at the University of California (Department of Psychology) concludes that "even if El Greco were astigmatic, he would have adapted to it, and his figures, whether drawn from memory or life, would have had normal proportions. His elongations were an artistic expression, not a visual symptom."〔S. Anstis, ''Was El Greco Astigmatic'', 208〕 According to Professor of Spanish John Armstrong Crow, "astigmatism could never give quality to a canvas, nor talent to a dunce".〔J.A. Crow, ''Spain: The Root and the Flower'', 216〕 The English writer W. Somerset Maugham attributed El Greco's personal style a "latent homosexuality" which he claimed the artist might have had; the doctor Arturo Perera attributed El Greco's style to the use of cannabis.〔M. Tazartes, ''El Greco'', 68-69〕 El Greco's re-evaluation was not limited to just scholarship. His expressiveness and colors influenced Eugène Delacroix and Édouard Manet.〔H.E. Wethey, ''El Greco and his School'', II, 55〕 The first painter who appears to have noticed the structural code in the morphology of the mature El Greco was Paul Cézanne, one of the forerunners of cubism.〔 Comparative morphological analyses of the two painters revealed their common elements, such as the distortion of the human body, the reddish and (in appearance only) unworked backgrounds, the similarities in the rendering of space etc.〔E. Foundoulaki, ''From El Greco to Cézanne'', 105-106〕 According to Brown, "Cézanne and El Greco are spiritual brothers despite the centuries which separate them".〔J. Brown, ''El Greco, the Man and the Myths'', 28〕 Fry observed that Cézanne drew from "his great discovery of the permeation of every part of the design with a uniform and continuous plastic theme".〔M. Lambraki-Plaka, ''From El Greco to Cézanne'', 15〕 The Symbolists, and Pablo Picasso during his blue period, drew on the cold tonality of El Greco, utilizing the anatomy of his ascetic figures. While Picasso was working on ''Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'', he visited his friend Ignacio Zuloaga in his studio in Paris and studied El Greco's ''Opening of the Fifth Seal'' (owned by Zuloaga since 1897).〔C.B. Horsley, (The Shock of the Old )〕 The relation between ''Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'' and the ''Opening of the Fifth Seal'' was pinpointed in the early 1980s, when the stylistic similarities and the relationship between the motifs of both works were analysed.〔R. Johnson, ''Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon'', 102-113〕 According to art historian John Richardson ''Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'' "turns out to have a few more answers to give once we realize that the painting owes at least as much to El Greco as Cézanne".〔J. Richardson, ''Picasso's Apocalyptic Whorehouse'', 40-47〕 Picasso said about ''Demoiselles d'Avignon'', "in any case, only the execution counts. From this point of view, it is correct to say that Cubism has a Spanish origin and that I invented Cubism. We must look for the Spanish influence in Cézanne. Things themselves necessitate it, the influence of El Greco, a Venetian painter, on him. But his structure is Cubist".〔D. de la Souchère, ''Picasso à Antibes'', 15〕 The early cubist explorations of Picasso were to uncover other aspects in the work of El Greco: structural analysis of his compositions, multi-faced refraction of form, interweaving of form and space, and special effects of highlights. Several traits of cubism, such as distortions and the materialistic rendering of time, have their analogies in El Greco's work. According to Picasso, El Greco's structure is cubist. On February 22, 1950, Picasso began his series of "paraphrases" of other painters' works with ''The Portrait of a Painter after El Greco''.〔E. Foundoulaki, ''From El Greco to Cézanne'', 111〕 Foundoulaki asserts that Picasso "completed ... the process for the activation of the painterly values of El Greco which had been started by Manet and carried on by Cézanne".〔E. Foundoulaki, ''Reading El Greco through Manet'', 40-47〕 The expressionists focused on the expressive distortions of El Greco. According to Franz Marc, one of the principal painters of the German expressionist movement, "we refer with pleasure and with steadfastness to the case of El Greco, because the glory of this painter is closely tied to the evolution of our new perceptions on art".〔Kandinsky-Marc, ''Blaue Reiter'', 75-76〕 Jackson Pollock, a major force in the abstract expressionist movement, was also influenced by El Greco. By 1943, Pollock had completed sixty drawing compositions after El Greco and owned three books on the Cretan master.〔J.T. Valliere, ''The El Greco Influence on Jackson Pollock'', 6-9〕 Contemporary artists are also inspired by El Greco's art. Kysa Johnson used El Greco's paintings of the Immaculate Conception as the compositional framework for some of her works, and the master's anatomical distortions are somewhat reflected in Fritz Chesnut's portraits.〔H.A. Harrison, (Getting in Touch With That Inner El Greco )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Art of El Greco」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|