"El Greco - Toledo 1900" Opens in Zaragoza, Spain

Written by Nita Atchinson Friday, 26 August 2011 15:09

Zaragoza, Spain - An exhibition of works by master painter El Greco has arrived in Zaragoza. The show of 27 paintings by the 16th century artist offers new insight into El Greco´s art and his adoptive city of Toledo - a town that came to appreciate his unique style anew in 1900 after centuries of neglect. The show aims to summon up life in Toledo through paintings and unpublished photos by the well-known painter and those inspired by his vanguardist techniques in later years.

Domenikos Theotokopoulos, "El Greco", spent 37 years of his life in Toledo. Following his death in April 1614, his work was looked on with disdain and he was characterised as a "wicked" and "extravagant" painter. It was not until 1900 that a dedicated gallery of his works was established in Toledo.

 "El Greco. Toledo 1900" was inaugurated  in the auditorium of Zaragoza University, where it will remain until 30 November before being mounted as the permanent exhibition at the El Greco Museum in the Santa Cruz Museum in Toledo, recently restored to the tune of three million euros by the Ministry of Culture.

"The greatest Mannerist of them all is the Spanish painter El Greco (Domenicos Theotokopoulos, 1541-1614, called "El Greco" because he was born in Crete). His artistic roots are diverse: he traveled between Venice, Rome, and Spain (settling in Toledo). The Christian doctrines of Spain made a crucial impact on his approach to painting, and his art represents a blend of passion and restraint, religious fervor and Neo-Platonism, influenced by the mysticism of the Counter-Reformation.

"El Greco's elongated figures, ever straining upward, his intense and unusual colors, his passionate involvement in his subject, his ardor and his energy, all combine to create a style that is wholly distinct and individual. He is the great fuser, and also the transfuser, setting the stamp of his angular intensity upon all that he creates. To the legacies of Venice, Florence, and Siena, he added that of the Byzantine tradition, not necessarily in form but in spirit (although he did in fact train as an icon painter in his early years in Crete). El Greco always produces icons, and it is this interior gravity of spirit that gives his odd distortions a sacred rightness.