El Greco: The Great Artist Forgotten For Three Centuries | Raiders Of The Lost Art | Perspective

[Music] 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 the artists are always I want God they are always at the forefront he was a visionary I need to pay me sort of visionary paintings I think he was just a very clever artist and 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 pinnacle died and his occupation 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 [Music] I was created by the all-powerful God to fill the universe with my masterpieces [Music] the story of El Greco begins on the island of Crete where he was born in the year 15 41 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 cannot sauce but in El Greco's time Crete was under the control of Venice El Greco was born in 1541 on capital of Crete presently known as eraklyon and at the time it was under the Venetian domination which means that it was a very close cultural environment Pete was quite unusual at that time it had a big focus on the post percent owned world Crete had really taken over as a center 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 and literature in poetry and also in painting so it was 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 excruciatingly intricate exploration from within the soul [Music] for a long time the details of El Greco's early career on the island of Crete remain largely elusive but in 1983 a breakthrough was made when his signature was discovered on a painting called the Dormition of the Virgin which helps to give us a better understanding of his early period we knew that he came from great we knew that he would have been trained as an icon painter Byzantine icon painter and great so basically that signature was a verification had been a completely traditional Greek icon or static painter and because 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 you know heretical and probably could get you burnt there's a much later painting for the burial of countour gas which has a very similar composition is 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 Creed 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 artist like he was Crete did not offer many possibilities Venice on the other hand at the time it was basically the center of the world when he went to Venice he just well 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 and the long elongated figures that we start see are Greco portraying and then also the color of Titian the sort of darkness and lights 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 implements of the Venice but still keeping his post both anti and heritage there whilst in Venice el greco befriended the greatest miniaturist of the Renaissance era julio clovie oh who features in his earliest known portrait and whose influence would help El Greco make his way to Rome El Greco were later placed clovey Oh 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 fan AZ who was a huge man of letters a direct lead linked to the Pope and had a fantastic array of different people and actually all Greco stayed in the Palazzo Farnese a which was designed by Michelangelo a Greco starts criticizing 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 is fun easy because having been in the lap of luxury he's gets thrown out but he manages to join the guild absent 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 criticizes Michelangelo we also see him appropriating a lot of his stylistic steps forward and he's 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 an order where el greco would create his greatest works [Music] he moved to Spain potentially for a few reasons one he wasn't getting the big grand Commission's that he had seen himself getting in Rome he had fallen out with outside of a funny is there in Spain we have felt it the second an incredibly powerful patron and also a collector of Titian which I think would repeal 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 the seconds making up 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 and 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 the dominica co2 coppola s-- would eventually acquire the name of El Greco it was the moniker that was given to him by by the Spanish effectively El Greco it's basically Spanish Italian and to basically define a Greek were 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 Caleta was the fact that he failed to have the patronage of philip ii because philip ii rejected the martyrdom of san Morris unfortunately when he produced the painting Philip didn't care but he was not the only artist to be rejected by for the second 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 you 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 he know this is somebody he knew exactly what he was doing I think this is a tremendous painting it's like an electric shock actually it's a color of the grass he's 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 colors that you get with a very very dark sky when everything is popped up [Music] 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 of April 1614 Greco died and practically his reputation died with him it will be here 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 Baroque stuff everything that he didn't and so you get people at 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 really 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 the 7th of 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 [Music] you must study the Masters butt guards the original style that beats within your soul and put to the sword those who would try to steal it [Music] 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 praised him for his techniques but they fined 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 color but also being slightly kind of worrying and out of the norm there was that great romantic cult for odd people and so leach gatherers or ancient mariners or 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 they loved him and also he was a visionary I need to paint these sort of visionary paintings so to get the full the full house in your hand you also had to be bonkers so they said 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 the El Greco starts to be this real hero for the romantics and the right attire view Gotye sees him as a 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 looks 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 Eugen delaqua and Paul Cezanne 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 is 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 exhibition where El Greco's were 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 wasn't part of the tunnel Roger Fry really promoted him as this father of of modernism he said that del greco had been a modernist of all Alette on I think one point he said oh yes he does 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 but he did spot the link between the flattening planar use of space quite often the paintings look like collages don't there so each individual figures means to cut out and stuck on and so he recognized the kinship between that and say San you also see other members of the Greensborough group like Clive Bell lording him is 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 appeal to them one of the most important figures in the El Greco's story is a basque artist named ignacio zuluaga he had been inspired to make copies of El Greco's held in the Museo del Prado he even bought an El Greco for himself in 1897 the spectacularly colorful opening of the fifth seal one of Zulu algas 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 made Demoiselles d'Avignon we believe that Picasso was looking at El Greco's work from really quite early on in 1898 you did a series of portraits which were based on our records 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 Elbe records the Greek Phoenicians in the middle of Spain and I think he just thought my goodness here's here's somebody who's actually just using bodies who's making these bodies react within that space and it is it is an astonishing painting the guys who paid him the ultimate compliment of saying that he was a cubist he said his face is cubist space you think well no no your space is our Greco space but it's um nice of you distressed it you can definitely see a similarity between the figures and the composition he was 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 enamored with the artists 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 periods have that same elongated limb stretched out slightly contorted feel that a lot of the al Greco figures have so I think you can see in the blue and Rose period a reference point with our Greco's are I suffer for my art and despise the witless moneyed 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 Ann Steffey Coquina and Franz Marc with Dubrow Reiter looked at him as a sort of pioneer of not minding what anyone else towards 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 patiently it seemed to the great German critic Julius McGrath 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 they 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 traveled 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

Channel: Perspective

Views: 46,399

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, el greco, art history, full length documentaries, history documentary, great artists, spanish renaissance, el greco documentary, documentary history, the arts, art documentary, art history documentary, art documentary 2020, el greco biography, underrated artists

Id: GzFTt-y2E6w

Length: 21min 35sec (1295 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 18 2020