Greco

About

This retrospective is the first major exhibition ever dedicated in France to this artist.

Born in 1541 in Crete, Domenico Theotokopoulos, known as El Greco, made his first apprenticeship in the Byzantine tradition before completing his training in Venice and Rome. 
However, it was in Spain that his art flourished and established itself sustainably from the 1570s onwards. Attracted by the wonderful promises of the El Escorial shipyard, the artist imported into the peninsula the color of Titian, the daring Tintoretto and the plastic force of Michelangelo. This eloquent synthesis, original but coherent with respect to its trajectory, gives Greco, who died four years after Caravaggio, a special place in the history of painting: that of the last great master of the Renaissance and the first great painter of the century. 'Gold.

Rediscovered in the late nineteenth century, recognized and adopted by the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, the artist enjoys the double prestige of tradition and modernity, linking Titian to the Fauves, Mannerism to cubism, the expressionism, to vorticism, to abstraction.

Greco is also an insatiable inventor of forms, developing innovative and daring compositions on which he will not stop coming back throughout his career, varying the effects, the plastic means, the intentions of his speech. The assured independence of his approach is then matched only by the electric freedom of his palette and his brush.

Among the particular scientific angles that are developed: the impressive moult of the painter at its beginnings, from icon art to its aesthetic adherence to the Venetian current;his inventions and variations, which allow, on the same theme, to measure the innovative character of his art and to follow the path of his style from Venice to Toledo; his sensibility, more humanistic than mystical, his spiritual, fiery and literary temperament.

His abundant production and the spectacle that each time gives his compositions guarantee to be able to trace the whole career of the painter, articulated by strong and decisive works, to restore to the public a fair, powerful but also unexpected image of an artist who It is believed to know through a dozen works, but a complete retrospective will contribute to illuminate a new light, promoting emotions, discoveries and rediscoveries around a timeless artist struck by the seal of modernity.