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El Greco Xavier Bray Chronology by Lois Oliver |
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"Since his
rediscovery by artists and critics in the nineteenth century, El Greco has
been perceived by many as the most 'modern' of the Old Masters. His work
played a central role in the development of the twentieth century art. Paul
Cezanne, Franz Marc and Jackson Pollock all studied and admired his
paintings. His bright and powerful colours, his
elongated forms and ecstatic expressions continue to startle and provoke us
today. Indeed, he is often seen as an artist working outside his time - a
proto-modern, misunderstood in his own day and waiting to be rediscovered. Such an approach,
however, is misleading, as this book sets out to show. Xavier Bray explains
how El Greco came to paint in such a 'modern' style and tells the fascinating
story of a painter who, in the late sixteenth century, left his native Published to accompany
the London showing of the exhibition El Greco, organized jointly by
the National Gallery an the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, this book
is designed to provide the reader with an outline of El Greco's odyssey from
producer of small-scale icons in Crete to creator of giant altar paintings
for churches in Toledo, Spain. Countering his reputation with some as an eccentric
painter thought to have suffered form astigmatism,
it presents him instead as a deeply thoughtful artist searching for a visual
language through which to express contemporary religious thought. El Greco's achievement
was to transform the mysteries of religion into graspable visual
representation. He modernised the idiom of the
post-Byzantine icon into large and colourful
compositions of mystical visions that made his works appear modern in his
time and continue to do so today…" Charles Saumarez Smith, Director, the National Gallery, |
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