For Brayan Pérez Laurencio, lover of images
…lived and painted without living; nor painting, in him, absorbed or internalized, yes, but everything transcending.
San Juan de la Cruz
It seems that during the period when El Greco (1541-1614) elongated his figures to the point of twisting and complicating them, as if he were abandoning Venetian light and color, he became more interesting to his contemporaries. He is no longer the meticulous portraitist of The Disrobing of Saint Andrew (1577-1579) or The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586-1588). He is more committed to himself than to his commissions. He is older and perhaps senses the approach of his death. This is when he paints Laocoon (1614), in which the group portrait of nudes is so compact and at the same time dismembered as if it were a single body, resembling the broken clouds of that leaden sky of Toledo.
But the El Greco who attracts the most attention, for better or worse, when he arrives in Spain, is not the one who recalls only the Venetian painters, but the sculptural images of Michelangelo, whom he said he did not like, but whom he admired deep down. This is the El Greco who painted Allegory of the Holy League (1579) and The Martyrdom of Saint Maurice and the Theban Legion (1580-1582) for El Escorial. Looking at both works, one might imagine that they were created by two different artists. The precision of the drawing and the beautiful abruptness of The Martyrdom… challenge the sometimes confusing ceremonial nature of The Allegory of the Holy League. In addition to avoiding the representation of the death of Saint Maurice, as he places the commander of the famous Theban Legion in the act of convincing his companions to remain faithful to the faith of Christ, there is a provocative and contemporary boldness in those characters gathered in the foreground that would immediately displease the Spanish monarch Philip II. Did the writer Fray José de Sigüenza, his advisor and librarian at El Escorial, influence his decision? It is almost certain. He said that “saints should be painted in such a way that they do not discourage prayer, but rather inspire devotion.” But he, quite reticent, ironic, and frank, with a keen eye for the arts, admired him. At the time, he would not have written: “they say it is very artistic,” “its author knows a lot,” and even “excellent things can be seen in his work.” But naturalism and “direct” representation of the facts were required. El Greco took the risk of not aestheticizing the fall of the Christian saint, and it cost him the denial of royal patronage. But was it the sensuality in the natural poses of the corpulent subjects and their beautiful faces that delighted José Lezama Lima so much that he mentioned or referred to El Greco with great interest?
For Lezama, El Greco is one of the three organs or summas of world painting, one of the most greedy excursionists who knows how to come and go from the dark, from the paradisiacal. Framed in a tradition of craftsmanship, where one can see who he may have assimilated, he is nevertheless authentic and unrepeatable. He mentions him in “Painting and Poetry in Cuba (in the 18th and 19th Centuries)”; he is evoked in connection with crucifixions and colors in “Homage to René Portocarrero” and later in this text, Lezama inserts a beautiful commentary on the transfigured landscape, the supernatural or imaginary dimension, which is possible to increase beyond survival. He does so based on Mount Sinai, which, incidentally, he mentions again in his words at an exhibition by Roberto Diago. He celebrates “the nobility elongated in El Greco’s questioning necks” in “Painting of Shadows.” In “Conferencia sobre Manuel de Zequeira y Manuel Justo de Rubalcava” (Lecture on Manuel de Zequeira and Manuel Justo de Rubalcava), he points out the friendship between the painter and one of his subjects: the poet and religious orator Hortensio Félix Paravicino y Arteaga. He deals with the portrait he was unable to paint of the author of Soledades at the beginning of Sierpe de Don Luis de Góngora. Does he mention it in Paradiso? He does in Opianno Licario, although no more than the customs officer Rousseau…
In his essay “La curiosidad barroca” (Baroque Curiosity), Lezama considers, without stating it directly, that El Greco represents the evolution of the term Baroque itself, although it is in “Sumas críticas del americano” (Critical Summaries of the American) where, on the subject of a certain Spanish nationalism in relation to Picasso, he draws on pictorial memory to establish parallels, to the point of acknowledging in parentheses: “(This malicious tradition was forgotten, that both El Greco and Goya were due to historical syntheses and not products of indigenism)”[3].
However, there is a passage in Sumas críticas del americano in which he concedes—and this is suggested—that El Greco has more influence on contemporary art than Picasso, since the latter “is a sign of the hypertrophy of today’s visual culture, rather than a record of quality.”[4] It is no coincidence that later, in his article “Plastic Assessment,” he highlights the importance of El Greco as a painter who was reconsidered above all in the twentieth century. In principle, it is as if he sidesteps the Cretan artist’s peculiar style, his inscape, in order to justify two innovators and admirers of El Greco, Picasso and Cézanne. Roberto Méndez has previously acknowledged this in “Lezama: la plástica en el fundamento del sistema poético” (Lezama: the visual arts at the foundation of the poetic system).[5] The author of Paradiso writes:
El Greco was copied, in the exercises of the pulse of the spirit, by Cézanne and Picasso. Picasso, in some portrait exercises at the beginning of his career, tried to imitate not so much the technique of his paintings as the devouring agitation of his flames and ashes. On the contrary, Cézanne turned it into an exercise, into the dryness of a discipline […] When I see Cézanne’s “The House of the Hanged Man,” I immediately think of El Greco’s Mount Athos. Cézanne began with the humility of reproduction, but in the end, the wind of the spirit penetrating the forest with the house of the curse[6]is revealed to him.
The “spirit’s breath” penetrating whatever it may be is an auroral effluvium recognizable first in El Greco’s bodily and suburban landscapes rather than in Cézanne’s. Perhaps the Cuban’s association between these painters is not surprising. But establishing a link with a poet is of a different caliber.
At the age of twenty-seven, Lezama published the essay “El secreto de Garcilaso” (The Secret of Garcilaso), later included in Analecta del reloj. Here we read: “If we contemplate in El Greco the resolute scandal of Venetian pulp and Castilian line”[7], it gives rise—as in Garcilaso—“to a fabricated new sobriety.” The text is even more fascinating when it characterizes Spanish poetics as if it were addressing the painter’s aesthetics at the same time. Keep in mind how, from an early age, he loved this kind of connection that simulates a succession of interpretations when, strictly speaking, it supports bold interpretive convergences. He combines and brings together different and distant personalities by homologation. He appreciates:
Castilian linearity, the Roman canon, between the Gothic that it dilutes and the Baroque that it subsequently enforces, a tense line, imperial politics, court, courtesy, courtliness, and a poetry in which the elements that compose it are presented without hurtful barbs; which uses all the simple bodies of poetry with respect to a movable but acquired center; turning the surrounding cosmos of pure empire into poetry in which the impression—any unease, malevolence, aristación—is resolved in concave, adjusting expression. So how could a long wave of dissatisfaction spring from there, romanticism in the living question of each generation?[8]
What he says about Garcilaso, isn’t it fully applicable to El Greco’s poetics? Both trapped in (and by) Toledo. This is Lezama’s examining disposition. But not the only one. When narrating at times in his reflective prose, “The Secret of Garcilaso,” he acquires greater presence when he emphasizes:
For a moment, the poet, the person, and the Luciferian counsel will triumph over the type, over imperial dogma. It is truly a delicate symbol, a delicate temporary achievement, and for a moment he tries to rescue himself, to consume himself in the different flower, the same flower that waves in the hands of El Greco’s subjects.
The comparison is more illustrative when the Spanish poet and military man is understood at the beginning of a paragraph from the plastic vision of the creator flattened on Spanish soil. Lezama will dwell on the poetry of the Toledo native. But he cannot resist initially conceiving of him from the painter’s perspective. He writes: “Both El Greco and Garcilaso—perhaps the most subtle and fused antinomy, the most miraculous production of Toledo—were forced to assimilate and overcome an Italian coloring led to serve the most eternal word of Castile, definitively resolved in their San Mauricio;”[10]. And then, in his analysis of Garcilaso’s verses, essentially in “Canción no has de tener/ conmigo que ver más en malo o en bueno/ trátame como ajeno” (Song, you must not have anything to do with me, for better or for worse, treat me as a stranger), he also alludes to the sensitivity and life story of an exalted Mannerist, of an abstract spirituality and also of someone who was very down to earth. There is probably no artist who wants to connect more with Spanish culture, or rather, with Spain itself, than El Greco. A stranger? Indeed, he clashes with tradition, speaks differently to his era, and transcends it.
Lezama looks at El Greco from the 20th century, passing through Góngora, San Juan de la Cruz, and many others, until he reaches the avant-garde painters born in the 19th century, the critics who reevaluate him, and those who still do not understand him and despise him. But his secret dialogue—that of El Greco—is preceded and mediated above all by a poet who preceded him, Garcilaso de la Vega. Although, applying impartiality and passion together, Lezama’s best assessment of such a unique artist can be found in “Valoración plástica” (Plastic Assessment), his quintessential text on El Greco, published on July 7, 1956. At the beginning, which is as valuable as the closing paragraph, his seductive mastery stands out:
First twist, then stretch. Byzantine stretches, not Gothic verticality, by El Greco, engendering in the evaluative mirror the same deformation of the stunned. Eras that take pleasure in discovering it, followed by those that like to lose it. Generations that assign him a share of true mysticism and generations that freeze his angels, hanging them in “maniérisme.” For some, his flame is true; for others, it is mannered. Góngora, Pacheco, Cossío, Barrés, Ortega, Ors, they either harass him or pay him flattering homage. Meanwhile, his elongated flame, his face with a chained goatee, laughs somberly, listening through a creaking keyhole to the judgments that exalt or condemn him. And he waits… for the next station[11].
Notes
[1] The other two are, for Lezama, Rafael and Picasso. And as Carlos Orlando Fino Gómez acknowledges in José Lezama Lima: Aesthetics and Historiography of Art in his Critical Work (Casa de las Américas Prize, 2014): “The organum does not deny tradition, it only recomposes it; it provides a place in visual rhetoric; it creates a recipient language, or the place where tradition is recognized. An organum is not the icon, but the language of confluence (pp. 293-294)”.
[2] José Lezama Lima: ”Todos los colores de Mariano Rodríguez” (All the Colors of Mariano Rodríguez), in La visualidad infinita (Infinite Visuality), Introduction, critical study, selection, and notes by Leonel Capote, Editorial Letras Cubanas, Havana, Cuba, 1994.
[3] José Lezama Lima: La expresión americana. Obras completas, Editorial Letras Cubanas, Havana, Cuba, 2010, p.77.
[4] Ibid., p.80.
[5] Roberto Méndez: La dama y el escorpión, Editorial Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, 2000.
[6] José Lezama Lima: “Plastic Assessment,” in The Artified Matter (Art Criticism), comp. and prologue by José Prats Sariol, Madrid, Editorial Tecnos, 1995, pp. 66-67.
[7] —————————-: “El secreto de Garcilaso” (The Secret of Garcilaso), in Analecta del reloj (Analects of the Clock), Obras completas (Complete Works), Editorial Letras Cubanas, Cuba, Havana, p. 8.
[8] José Lezama Lima: “El secreto de Garcilaso,” in op. cit., p. 8.
[9] Ibid., p. 23.
[10] “El secreto de Garcilaso,” in op. cit., p. 25.
[11] Cf. La materia artizada, in op. cit., p. 65.
Image: Detail from St. Andrew and St. Francis (1595), by El Greco.
