Picasso and El Greco review: kindred spirits separated by centuries

Throughout his career, Picasso sought out the Old Masters, wrestling with the works of Velázquez, Rembrandt and El Greco in his search for an avant-garde language. “The art of great painters who live in other times,” he said in 1923, “is more alive today than it ever was.” Picasso — El Greco, an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel, revisits Picasso’s admiration for the great painters of the Renaissance, in particular his life-long obsession with one of the most idiosyncratic, through 30 pairs of paintings.

How was it that this 16th-century figure, born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Crete, came to be a beacon for Picasso? By the time Picasso was born in 1881, El Greco’s reputation was on the rise after centuries of obscurity. The image of him that had endured into the fin-de-siècle was that of a rebel, known for suing clients for higher pay and for falling out of favour with powerful would-be patrons (most significantly Philip II of Spain) because of his unusual reinterpretations of religious scenes. El Greco was recognised then as an expressionist spirit for his quivering, elongated figures and his sacrifice of realism for the sake of a heightened spirituality.

The exhibition offers a prime example in “The Agony in the Garden” (c1597-1607), where Jesus’s acceptance of his impending crucifixion is illustrated through a dynamic play of colours: the vivid crimson of Christ’s robe and the almost blinding white figure of the angel blaze triumphantly against a dark, nondescript backdrop, far outshining the moon, which casts a barely visible glow over the soldiers marching to arrest Christ in the distance. The scene’s anachronistic modernism caused much commotion when a replica of the painting was displayed in the National Gallery in London in 1919, leading critic Roger Fry to observe: “Here is an Old Master who is not merely modern but actually appears a good many steps ahead of us, turning us back to show us the way.”

It’s not hard to see why such a nonconformist would capture the imagination of the new wave of restless, innovative artists emerging in Europe. Picasso and his peers perceived a kindred individuality not just in the character but also the art of the trained icon painter, whose time in Venice, Rome and Toledo gave rise to a striking, often disturbing blend of Byzantine, Italian and Spanish styles.

Picasso’s own interest in El Greco was ignited as a young art student in Madrid in the 1890s, where he was drawn in his frequent visits to the Prado to the Greek painter’s portraits. Picasso’s sketches of gaunt faces with dark, angular features reveal his delight in what he called “all those gentlemen with pointed beards”. But the student wasn’t just imitating; he states his identification with the Old Master in one sketch scribbled with the words “Yo El Greco” (“I, El Greco”).

In 1901, tragedy prompted Picasso to turn to this master of emotional drama. The burial scene painted directly after the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas refers directly to El Greco’s “Burial of the Count of Orgaz” (1586-88), in which the picture is divided into earthly and heavenly sections; this picture is not in the show, but we see the same technique here in “The Adoration of the Name of Jesus” (c1577-79). Picasso emulates the Greek painter’s monochrome cloudy sky without depth, but instead of a consort of angels, paradise is imagined as a lively brothel. What’s clear is that in El Greco, Picasso found a means for free expression.

The exhibition presents Renaissance masterpieces that allow us to see the emotional and formal qualities of Picasso’s oeuvre in a new light. His “Homme, femme et enfant” (1906) becomes charged with symbolism against the Prado’s “Holy Family with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John” (c1600); the young artist depicts himself looking down at his lover, Fernande Olivier, holding a child, his blank expression betraying an ambivalence towards paternity not unlike El Greco’s Joseph, who timidly peers over the dominant figures of Saint Anne and the Virgin to look at the infant Jesus.

El Greco endures as a creative source even as Picasso veered toward abstraction — Picasso once reportedly described him to curator Romuald Dor de la Souchère as “Cubist in construction”. Indeed, the Renaissance painter stood out for his break with conventional perspectives: the collapse of foreground and background in Budapest’s “The Penitent Magdalene” (1576-77), the sinner’s cloak rising up sharply to merge with the craggy rock face in the top right of the painting, bears a strong affinity with how the chair and sitter splinter and fuse together in “Femme assise dans un fauteuil” (1910).

This angularity can also be seen in the folds of Saint Bartholomew’s robe in one of several apostle portraits by El Greco on display. Accentuated through rough brushstrokes of harsh white and soft blacks — what one of his contemporaries disparaged as “cruel stains” — these find a modernist counterpart in the monochrome palette of 1911’s “Le Poète”, which uses shading to create depth.

Likewise, “The Resurrection”, painted in 1600 for the high altar of the Colegio de la Encarnación in Madrid, pre-empts the extreme perspective in the narrow “Homme à la mandoline” (1911): Christ ascends to heaven with his legs serenely aligned, contrasting with the chaotic tumble of limbs in the lower half of the painting, creating a confusion of depth similar to the cubist work’s angles and circular forms. The presence of so much religious art opens up a new spiritualism even in Picasso’s most abstract works. Rather than being impenetrable and intellectual, his analytical cubism transforms into expectant scenes, pregnant with mystery and narrative potential.

El Greco continued to inspire Picasso into his late career, which has been much less discussed than his influence on the earlier work. Towards the end of the exhibition we encounter the 1967 painting “The Musketeer”, a caricaturish figure in Renaissance costume. On the back, the octogenarian has written “Domenico Theotocopulos van Rijn da Silva”, a mash-up of the names of his three artistic heroes (El Greco, Rembrandt, Velázquez). It shows not only how the mature artist was eager to cement his place among them, but also that he never stopped drawing from art history in order to stay original.

To September 25, kunstmuseumbasel.ch