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culture

Picasso and el Greco

Running through 25 September at Basel’s Kunstmuseum, Picasso and

El Greco is one of Europe’s great special exhibitions this summer season.

Featuring some 30 masterworks by each been Spanish colonies), found consolation in
artist, it tracks what its organizers have called revisiting an artistic past that was one of the
“their dialog, one of the most fascinating such greatest in the Western world. Thus, Diego
colloquies in the history of art”. In reality, the Velázquez and Francisco de Goya joined El
colloquy was heavily one-sided for it was Picasso, Greco in an artistic revival that has continued
almost three centuries after the departure of El to today.
Greco from the art scene, who was drawn to the
Greek and his impressive body of work, drawing However, as a subject of study and source
on it incessantly for inspiration and his own of inspriation for the new age, El Greco was
development as an artist. in a class by himself, for he had always been
unconventional, in large part because his early
Picasso’s attention was drawn to El Greco itinerant years had allowed him to familiarize
when, starting in the end of the nineteenth himself with the Greek-Byzantine and Venetian
century, the latter enjoyed an immense revival artistic traditions. These he molded into his
of interest and appreciation after a long period own particular artistic expression imbued
of inattention that had begun shortly after his with what he found in Spain. His uniqueness
death. This revival grew out of Spain’s loss of was further enhanced by a remarkable lack of
her last remaining major colonial possessions documentary evidence about his life, which
in 1898 during the Spanish-American and a allowed all sorts of imaginings, speculations
reassessment of what had been Spain’s golden and interpretations.
age, the Siglo de Oro, which coincided with El
Greco’s lifetime (1541 to 1614). This is where Picasso comes in. By the age
of eighteen already, he was borrowing from
The Spanish nationalists, smarting from El Greco, adopting the old master’s motifs
their country’s humiliation at the hands of but always with an unmistakable imprint
an upstart new arrival on the international of his own. Man, after El Greco from 1899
scene (a huge piece of whose territory had was modeled on Saint Jerome as Scholar, but
whereas Saint Jerome is represented from the
waist up, seated at a table with a book spread
out before him, the Man is primarily a facial
portrait with only the top of the chest visible.
Yet the set of the head and the intent gaze of
each make them an unmistakable pair.

Picasso’s Madame Canals (Benedetta Bianco) is
a three-quarter portrait looking right with the
full bust represented. El Greco’s Lady in a Fur
Wrap is a similar portrait but with the subject
looking left. While Picasso’s subject wears an
elaborate headdress, El Greco’s wears only a
head scarf. Yet, once again, it is the intense
gaze of each, and in this case also the set of the
mouth, that makes them counterparts.

The Burial of Casagemas (Evocation), which

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