In short, he was a vanguardist avant la lettre.Įl Greco’s unusual artistic itinerary is one factor that no doubt contributed to his innovative approach to painting. Over the last twenty years, however, documentary discoveries and new interpretations have provided almost epiphanic insights into this itinerant artist, revealing that El Greco was a determined transgressor of the social, cultural, and artistic norms of his time and place. Cossío, attempting to construct a historical context for the artist, hypothesized that his extraordinary paintings were inspired by the writings of the contemporary Spanish mystics St. Our understanding of El Greco is still haunted by an idea that emerged about a hundred years ago, when Spanish scholar Manuel B. Seen in this light, Picasso’s notion of El Greco as a proto-Cubist may begin to look suspicious and not a little egotistical-but, as it happens, the affinities between the two painters may actually be even greater than he imagined. The Surrealists, for example, appropriated Hieronymus Bosch, while Frank Stella positioned himself as the Peter Paul Rubens of late abstraction. After all, it wasn’t unheard of for twentieth-century painters to construct fake artistic pedigrees in order to validate their own creations and wrap themselves in the guise of historic respectability. Nonetheless, Picasso’s sweeping claims about El Greco may initially seem a bit incredible. As early as 1899, he had sketched the head of a man resembling an El Greco saint and scribbled beneath it, “Yo, El Greco.” In his recent study of the two artists, Robert Lubar incisively analyzed that lapidary inscription: “Picasso simultaneously paid homage to a venerable Spanish painter and declared his position as El Greco’s legitimate heir.” In 1960, when Picasso reportedly made this statement, he was hardly a recent convert to the cult of El Greco. His claim to be the sole inventor of Cubism is certainly exaggerated, but what are we to make of his claim on El Greco as aesthetic forebear? A Venetian painter but he is Cubist in construction.” Pablo Picasso must have been in an exceptionally grandiose and perverse frame of mind when he uttered these words. We should look for Spanish influence in Cézanne. “Cubism is spanish in origin, and it was I who invented Cubism.
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