Why El Greco Is Irresistible
In her NYRB summary of two new exhibitions, Ingrid Rowland writes: ‘For many of the four hundred years since the death of Domenikos Theotokopoulos, the artist known to his Spanish neighbors as El Greco, his work was regarded with the same disdain as that of his younger contemporary Caravaggio. If Caravaggio’s detractors vowed that, as Poussin put it, he had “come into the world to ruin painting,†the Greek who made his career in the land of Don Quixote was “contemptible and ridiculous, as much for the disjointed drawing as for the insipid colors.”‘ Pictured is “The Burial of the Count of Orgaz.”
