HOLY TOLEDO.(El Greco, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 20-OCT-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

"We can define El Greco's work by saying that what he did well none did better, and that what he did badly none did worse," the Spanish painter and scholar Antonio Palomino wrote in 1724. That violently mixed assessment struck me as just right when I read it on a wall of the Metropolitan Museum's current, tremendous El Greco retrospective. Critical quotations, pro and con, pepper the show's superb installation by the curator David Davies; they vivify the warring opinions provoked by El Greco in his lifetime and ever since, except for a spell of near-oblivion that ended in the nineteenth century, when, like Vermeer, he was rescued by French aesthetes. A bit later, Picasso took him as a formative influence and thereby installed him in the boiler room of modern painting. El Greco feels at issue in art again today, as new painters, notably John Currin, raid museums for nuggets of refractory inspiration. To consider the Master of Toledo is still and always to engage in argument--with oneself, as likely as not. At the show, I found myself alternately cheering and cringing, inwardly, like the fan of a talented but goof-prone sports team.

The glory and the problem of El Greco are...

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