El Greco Xavier Bray Chronology by Lois Oliver

"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 island of Crete in order to cross half of Europe in search of new artistic horizons. 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, London