Raiders of the Lost Art | Season 2: Episode 4 | El Greco - Lost in Time | Free Documentary History

It took nearly three centuries for El Greco's paintings to be truly appreciated. No artist has ever been more ahead of his time. What does it mean to be ahead of your time? I think that artists are always avant-garde. They are always at the forefront. He was a visionary. I mean, he'd paint these sort of visionary paintings. I think he was just a very clever artist, an extremely talented artist. A visitor to El Greco's studio once wrote that he'd made smaller versions of his most monumental paintings. But these exuberant pictures were never as popular as his sculpture and architecture. He was an outsider and he didn't paint like anybody else and he was a foreigner. Rejecting everyone else's opinions, doing what he had to do anyway. But El Greco died and his reputation died with him. After centuries in the wilderness, his reputation would finally be restored as he became a hero to the great artists of the modern era. I was created by the all-powerful God to fill the universe with my masterpieces. The story of El Greco begins on the island of Crete, where he was born in the year 1541, when it was known as the Kingdom of Candia. Crete had once been home to the mighty Minoan civilization and the oldest city in all Europe, Knossos. But in El Greco's time, Crete was under the control of Venice. El Greco was born in 1541 on the capital of Crete, presently known as Heraklion. And at the time it was under the Venetian domination, which means that it was a very cross-cultural environment. Crete was quite unusual at that time. It had a big focus on the post-Byzantine world. Crete had really taken over as a centre of what had been Byzantine painting. Now I guess you'd call it Greek Orthodox painting. But it was a colony of Venice. This really permeated across all of its culture. So you see it in books, in literature, in poetry, and also in painting. So it was a real mix, and I think this is something that's really important to his upbringing as an artist. Artists create out of a sense of desolation. The spirit of creation is an excruciating, intricate exploration from within the soul. For a long time, the details of El Greco's early career on the island of Crete remained largely elusive. But in 1983, a breakthrough was made when his signature was discovered on a painting called The Dormition of the Virgin, which helped give us a better understanding of his early period. We knew that he came from Crete. We knew that he would have been trained as an icon painter, a Byzantine icon painter on Crete. So basically, that signature was a verification. He had been a completely traditional Greek iconostatic painter. And of course, the traditions of Greek painting ran contrary to those of Renaissance painting, which was all about experimentation and things. This was all about everything staying the same. And dangerous things like perspective were heretical and probably could get you burnt. There's a much later painting called The Burial of Count Orgas, which has a very similar composition. You can see in the structure of the painting some references. So there's an idea that there's this lineage from his early work through to his late work, which remains constant from The Dormition of the Virgin. Crete had been under Venetian rule for over three centuries before El Greco was born. The island had experienced a great artistic flourishing in that time. But in order to further his career, El Greco must have felt he needed to work in Venice itself. Being an ambitious young Cretan artist like he was, Crete did not offer many possibilities. Venice, on the other hand, at the time, it was basically the centre of the world. When he went to Venice, he just went like a lot of artists. The eyes just opened up and they went, Titian, my goodness me. So Titian and Tintoretto became huge influences. Tintoretto in the long, elongated figures that we start to see El Greco portraying, and then also the colour of Titian, the sort of darkness and light. Apparently there's an anecdote that he was found in a darkened room painting because he believed that it was more expressive and he could get more in touch with the mystical religious quality of what he was trying to portray in the dark. So he's picking up all the influences of Venice, but still keeping his post-Byzantine heritage there. Whilst in Venice, El Greco befriended the greatest miniaturist of the Renaissance era, Julio Clovio, who features in his earliest known portrait and whose influence would help El Greco make his way to Rome. El Greco would later place Clovio next to Titian, Raphael and Michelangelo in the foreground of his painting, The Purification of the Temple. But whilst in Rome, the recently departed Michelangelo would come in for surprising criticism from El Greco. Once in Rome, he had a friend who had introduced him to Cardinal Farnese, who was a huge man of letters, directly linked to the Pope and had a fantastic array of different people, and actually El Greco stayed in the Palazzo Farnese, which was designed by Michelangelo. El Greco starts criticising some of the major masters of the Renaissance. He sees them as not being truly religious or truly getting the message across, perhaps quite decadent. So he says, I can do a better Sistine ceiling than Michelangelo, let me paint over it, I can do it better, which obviously ruffles a few feathers. He does have some sort of contretemps with Farnese, because having been in the lap of luxury, he gets thrown out. But he manages to join the Guild of St Luke, he sets up a studio on his own. He is obviously trying to make a go of being in Rome at the time. While he openly criticises Michelangelo, we also see him appropriating a lot of his stylistic steps forward, and he's definitely referencing his work, but at the same time voicing that he's breaking away from it. I paint because the spirits whisper madly inside my head. El Greco had made his way from the outpost of Crete to the artistic capital of Rome, but his career was stalling, especially with his comments about the masters of the High Renaissance. A move to Spain, under the rule of Philip II, would soon be in order, where El Greco would create his greatest works. He moved to Spain potentially for a few reasons. One, he wasn't getting the big grand commissions that he had seen himself getting in Rome. He had fallen out with Alessandro Farnese. In Spain, we have Philip II, an incredibly powerful patron and also a collector of Titian, which I think would have appealed to El Greco, and he would have seen a window there. He was obviously quite a difficult personality. And he obviously thought, Well, listen, Philip II's making the Escorial happen. Let's go to Madrid. There is also this burgeoning religiosity. I think that appealed to El Greco, who almost saw this mystical side of religion. So I think there's a religious reason, there's a financial reason, an opportunity, and also that he had created some waves in Rome and perhaps wasn't the most popular of artists working there. It was in Spain that Dominicus Theotokopoulos would eventually acquire the name of El Greco. It was the moniker that was given to him by the Spanish. Effectively, El Greco, it's basically Spanish, Italian, and to basically define a Greek working in foreign lands, which is brilliant. When El Greco arrived in Spain, the palace of El Escorial was under construction and King Philip II of Spain was in great need of artworks to decorate his enormous new construction just north of Madrid. This seemed to be an ideal opportunity for El Greco, but he was unable to seize it, and he settled in Toledo instead. What made him go to Toledo was the fact that he failed to have the patronage of Philip II because Philip II rejected the martyrdom of St Maurice. Unfortunately, when he produced the painting, Philip didn't like it. But he was not the only artist to be rejected by Philip II. I mean, Benvenuto Cellini also was cut down to size by the monarch. Secondly, it's because he got a major commission to work in Toledo, which clearly gave him the opportunity to go there, and effectively, he went there and never left. It was just like he found his place in the world, almost, in Toledo. It was in Toledo that he created his best-known works, including the remarkable view of his new homeland. He's a great manipulator of paint and surface, and people who think that he was perhaps mad or bad eyesight or whatever, I think this is really not correct. You know, this is somebody who knew exactly what he was doing. I think this is a tremendous painting. It's like an electric shock, actually. The colour of the grass is just really piercing and acidic, and it's like the sort of green that you get just after rain, actually, and with all that sort of rainbow colours that you get with a very, very dark sky when everything is popped up. The language of art is celestial in origin and can be understood only by the chosen. El Greco would die in Toledo in 1614. He had produced an astonishing array of paintings during his near four decades in Spain, but his reputation essentially died with him as the Baroque style rose to prominence. 7th April 1614, El Greco died, and practically his reputation died with him. It will be years, centuries in fact, before we hear about this artist again. He had been very successful in Toledo, and that was that, and that was quite an isolated place, and his reputation just disappeared. And he was only really rediscovered in the 19th century. There again, the Baroques did everything that he didn't, and so you get people like Caravaggio. It's all got to be out there and realistic, and that just wasn't El Greco. So his reputation went into catastrophic decline, I think almost immediately after his death. El Greco's slow rise to the status of one of the great masters, adored by figures such as Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso, would be one of the most remarkable stories in the history of art. El Greco died on 7th April 1614, leaving behind an incredible collection of artworks, but almost no immediate following. His eccentric style was almost completely at odds with the aesthetics of the new Baroque era. It seemed for certain that he would be lost to the annals of time. You must study the masters, but guard the original style that beats within your soul, and put to the sword those who would try to steal it. El Greco's original style would take centuries to be truly appreciated. In that intervening period, his work would be deemed worthy of scorn. But El Greco's journey back to the status of a great master really started in 1838, when a gallery of Spanish works was opened in the Louvre, and he was finally seen by a larger audience. Many felt that his bizarre paintings were a sign of madness. You see some Spanish writers in the 18th, 19th century, and they praise him for his techniques, but they find him a sort of mad painter, very eccentric, off the wall, completely different from everyone else. So he's sort of seen as being quite advanced in the way that he used paint and colour, but also being slightly kind of worrying and out of the norm. There was that great romantic cult for odd people, and so leech gatherers or ancient mariners or whatever, and in France probably even more so. So because he was an outsider and he didn't paint like anybody else and he was a foreigner, they loved him. And also he was a visionary, he'd paint these sort of visionary paintings. So to get the full house in your hand, you also had to be bonkers, so they sort of vented him as mad, although I don't think there's any indication really that he was. I don't think people thought he was mad in his time. They thought he was an extremely talented person, and I think they were just wowed by the paintings and by his own religious attitude. We see in 19th-century France that El Greco starts to be this real hero for the romantics, and the writer Teodil Gauthier sees him as this sort of wonder child of the romantic sentiment, rejecting everyone else's opinions, doing what he had to do anyway. So really he becomes from a character that everyone looked at with a bit of disdain suddenly to becoming a real hero. More and more individuals were finding themselves captivated by the recently rediscovered El Greco. They included two of the greatest French artists of the 19th century, Eugène Delacroix and Paul Cézanne. And in England, the art critic Roger Fry, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, would also have a major impact on re-establishing El Greco's reputation in the 20th century. We see Roger Fry writing largely in the Burlington Magazine, writing a lot about post-Impressionism, and seeing El Greco as really an artist who shone the way and provided a reference point for a lot of artists working in France. People were shocked. We have accounts of people going to see exhibitions where El Greco's work was pictured in the National Gallery in the 20th century, and they found it shocking. They couldn't believe that the National Gallery would acquire a painting by such a modern artist who didn't belong in the National Gallery, was not part of the canon. Roger Fry really promoted him as this father of modernism. He said that El Greco had been a modernist avant la lettre, and I think at one point he said, he does us a great favour of turning back from in front of us and looking back at us, and you think, oh, come on, Roger. You know, that's so anachronistic. But he did spot the link between the flattening, plainer use of space. Quite often the paintings look like collages, don't they? So each individual figure has been sort of cut out and stuck on. And so he recognised the kinship between that and Cézanne. You also see other members of the Greensbury group, like Clive Bell, lauding him as lighting the way for them, as being a pioneer, and they can look back to him as someone who was true to what he believed in, stood out from the crowd, and stylistically had elements which appealed to them. One of the most important figures in the El Greco story is a Basque artist named Ignacio Zuluaga. He had been inspired to make copies of El Grecos held in the Museo del Prado. He even bought an El Greco for himself in 1897, the spectacularly colourful opening of the fifth seal. One of Zuluaga's friends who saw the painting was none other than Pablo Picasso. Having witnessed it, he went on to paint one of the most important works in his entire career, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. We believe that Picasso was looking at El Greco's work from really quite early on. In 1898, he did a series of portraits which were based on El Greco's work. As he moved to Paris, we know that he had reproductions of El Greco in his studio. He was looking closely at him as an old master. It was fantastic for him because it's another outsider artist. So there's Picasso in France as the Spaniard and there is El Greco, the Greek Venetian, in the middle of Spain. And I think he just thought, my goodness, here's somebody who's actually just using bodies, who's making these bodies react within that space. And it is an astonishing painting. Picasso paid him the ultimate compliment of saying that he was a cubist. He said his space is cubist space. You think, well, no, no, your space is El Greco's space, but it's nice of you to suggest it. You can definitely see a similarity between the figures and the composition. You can tell that he's looking closely at it. So it's a really important influence for Picasso and an important moment in the history of modern art. Picasso was so enamoured with the Cretan artist who found his way to Toledo that he would even do his own interpretation of an El Greco portrait of his son. The figures of Picasso's Blue Period and Rose Period have that same elongated limbs, stretched out, slightly contorted feel that a lot of the El Greco figures have. So I think you can see in the Blue and Rose Period a reference point with El Greco as well. I suffer for my art and despise the witless, mummied scoundrels who praise it. El Greco's supreme status was now assured. He had inspired so many of the greatest artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his bold compositions were making him a hero to the burgeoning Expressionist movement. People like Anselmo de Kirchner and Franz Marc with De Blau Reiter looked at him as a sort of pioneer of not minding what anyone else thought, showing your emotion, being expressive. You get this sort of angularity, you get the angularity because of the stretched figures and of the way that he paints his draperies, which is pretty static, so that the drapes look very crisp rather than soft. You can certainly see that that's the same sort of thing that the Expressionists were trying to get after. Expressionism was meant to be the inverse of Impressionism, so Impressionism looked at things from the outside. Expressionism was about kind of vomiting up your psychic insides, and patently it seemed to the great German critic Julius Meyer Greff, who was the sort of godfather of Expressionism, that that's what El Greco had been doing, that he'd been reaching deep into his tormented soul. I think they looked back at him for those reasons and that he really reached an inner world or expression of an inner feeling. That's what they were striving for. He embodied, as a character and in his art, something that they really looked up to and wanted to express themselves. El Greco travelled a unique journey as an artist, and along the way he had absorbed influences from the post-Byzantine Cretan Renaissance to the Mannerism of Michelangelo. Having finally found his niche in Toledo, it seemed that the works he created there that expressed his intense inner feelings were destined to be lost in time. But the modern world reclaimed him as one of their own, and a great master was reborn.