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September 29, 2003
Thomas Crown, call your office
I just got back from the press view of the Metropolitan Museum's El Greco retrospective, which opens next Tuesday and will be up through Jan. 11. It's the first major museum retrospective of El Greco's work in 20 years, and if I may be so bold as to use a word tarnished by excessive handling, it is awesome. At the same time, the scale of the show is unexpectedly reasonable: it contains 70 pieces, a surprisingly modest number for a blockbuster-type show, small enough that you can see the individual paintings rather than being steamrollered by them. The wall labels are informative and (mostly) unobtrusive, and to my amateur's eye the show was quite effectively hung.The curatorial emphasis is on El Greco's modernity (several of the labels contain miniature reproductions of El Greco-influenced paintings by Cézanne, Picasso, and Jackson Pollack), an approach which is at the same time obvious and appropriate. Even now, you can't help but be struck by the non-realistic distortions of El Greco's late devotional paintings, which all but quiver with a harrowing, desperate intensity that leaps across the intervening centuries to speak directly to those of us born in what W.H. Auden so famously called the Age of Anxiety. (I always think of El Greco in connection with Don Carlo Gesualdo, the Italian composer of Renaissance madrigals whose harmonic extremism similarly breathes the air of modern times.) Yet the show isn't locked into its own preconceptions: in fact, the gallery I liked best was devoted to secular portraits, including an exquisite cardboard miniature on loan from the Hispanic Society of America.
It makes no sense to speak of "highlights." This retrospective is so rich that one comes away feeling as if all the museums of the world had been stripped of their very best El Grecos solely for the delectation of the connoisseurs of New York and London (where "El Greco" will travel next February). Still, I know which painting I would have stuck In the Bag had the guards been looking the other way. Two different versions of "The Adoration of the Name of Jesus" (catalogue nos. 22 and 23) hang side by side in the third gallery, one a medium-large oil on canvas whose festive colors and crowded composition put me in mind of Florine Stettheimer's designs for the first production of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts. The other is a much smaller version of the same scene which El Greco may have painted in order to hang in his own studio. It's more immediate, more arresting, more concentrated. That one wins the blue ribbon, at least as far as I'm concerned. I mean to go back several times to look at it, though there are several other works with which I want to spend more time, including the three show-stopping icons displayed in vitrines in the first gallery (one of which will only be on display for the first six weeks of the exhibition, all the more reason to go early and often).
What about crowds? Well, the press view was jammed, so I'm assuming that the public will be coming in droves, especially since you don't need a special ticket (your regular Met admission fee lets you in whenever the museum is open). But I wouldn't be altogether surprised if "El Greco" doesn't draw quite so many visitors as, say, the Met's Vermeer-and-friends exhibition of a few years ago, if only because El Greco is not, to put it mildly, an easy artist.
I'll update you on the crowd situation once the show has been open for a few weeks. For the moment, I'd do my best to go on a weekday morning if at all possible. But even if you have to see it on a Sunday afternoon, make "El Greco" your very first priority. You won't find it comfortable, but you'll never forget it.
Posted September 29, 2003 1:06 AM
