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Art History-El Greco

Analyse why El Greco’s work had such an impact on Spanish artists at the turn of the twentieth century.

At the heart of painting in Spain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a search for self-identity in a time of crisis and change. It was a time of civil disturbances and the loss of the country’s last colonies. In Barcelona social structures were severely taxed by the rapid industrialization of the region and its subsequent explosive population growth. Matters culminated in the unstable atmosphere generated by waves of political terrorism in the Catalan Capital in the 1890s. Escalating anarchist activity and recurrent cycles of labor unrest and harsh official retribution generated a destabilizing uncertainty in the community.[1] This atmosphere gave raise to an intellectual movement during which Catalan writers, artists and intellectuals developed a mode of thinking and writing that questioned inherited values in the areas of religion, politics and aesthetics. This movement is known as Modernisme, a term that first appeared in 1884 in a manifesto accompanying the publication of the Barcelona magazine L’Avenc.[2] The concern for the question of national identity is reflected in the regionalist painting of traditional Spanish themes like bullfights, beautiful women or majas, as for example Mariano Fortuny’s The Bullfighter’s Salute and Ignacio Zuloaga Woman with a Fan, though paradoxically these same themes were developed within the context of a decidedly modern language. In The Bullfighter’s Salute, clear lines dissolve to give way to dynamic brushstrokes adding

to the drama and immediacy of the scene and in Woman with a Fan the woman is not so much a object to be looked at, as was the case with previous depictions of women, but she confronts us with a direct and flirtatious gaze. Ramon Casas advocated powerful immediate emotion over pedantic reconstruction of an idealized national past-painting that reflected the realities, complications, and...