Posthumous critical reputation
El Greco was disdained by the immediate generations after his death because his work was opposed in many respects to the principles of the early baroque style which came to the fore near the beginning of the 17th century and soon supplanted the last surviving traits of the 16th-century Mannerism. El Greco was deemed incomprehensible and had no important followers. Only his son and a few unknown painters produced weak copies of his works. Late 17th- and early 18th-century Spanish commentators praised his skill but criticized his antinaturalistic style and his complex iconography. Some of these commentators, such as Antonio Palomino and Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, described his mature work as "contemptible", "ridiculous" and "worthy of scorn". The views of Palomino and Bermúdez were frequently repeated in Spanish historiography, adorned with terms such as "strange", "queer", "original", "eccentric" and "odd". The phrase "sunk in eccentricity", often encountered in such texts, in time developed into "madness".
Still, his paintings influenced Diego Velazquez, as well as Francisco Goya, the former positioning the main characters of his paintings in the same manner as El Greco, and painting the folds in the clothes in a similar fashion. Hortensio Félix Paravicino, one of El Greco's admirers, called his genius as being greater than that of Apelles.
With the arrival of Romantic sentiments in the late 18th century, El Greco's works were examined anew. To French writer Théophile Gautier, El Greco was the precursor of the European Romantic movement in all its craving for the strange and the extreme. Gautier regarded El Greco as the ideal romantic hero (the "gifted", the "misunderstood", the "mad"), and was the first who explicitly expressed his admiration for El Greco's later technique. French art critics Zacharie Astruc and Paul Lefort helped to promote a widespread revival of interest in his painting. Lefort particularly extolled El Greco, along with Velasquez, as one of the founders of the Spanish School which was mainly branded by its realism.
In the 1890s, Spanish painters living in Paris adopted him as their guide and mentor. However, in the popular English-speaking imagination he remained the man who "painted horrors in the Escorial" in the words of Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia in 1899.
In 1908, Spanish art historian Manuel Bartolomé Cossío published the first comprehensive catalogue of El Greco's works; in this book El Greco was presented as the founder of the Spanish School. The same year Julius Meier-Graefe, a scholar of French Impressionism, traveled in Spain, expecting to study Velázquez, but instead becoming fascinated by El Greco; he recorded in 1910 his experiences in Spanische Reise (Spanish Journey, published in English in 1926), the book which widely established El Greco as a great painter of the past "outside a somewhat narrow circle". In El Greco's work, Meier-Graefe found foreshadowing of modernity. These are the words Meier-Graefe used to describe El Greco's impact on the artistic movements of his time:
He [El Greco] has discovered a realm of new possibilities. Not even he, himself, was able to exhaust them. All the generations that follow after him live in his realm. There is a greater difference between him and Titian, his master, than between him and Renoir or Cézanne. Nevertheless, Renoir and Cézanne are masters of impeccable originality because it is not possible to avail yourself of El Greco's language, if in using it, it is not invented again and again, by the user.
To the English artist and critic Roger Fry in 1920, El Greco was the archetypal genius who did as he thought best "with complete indifference to what effect the right expression might have on the public". Fry described El Greco as "an old master who is not merely modern, but actually appears a good many steps ahead of us, turning back to show us the way". In the 1890s, French painter Henri Rouart called him "incomparable" and "the most beautiful of all". Painter Mary Cassatt wrote in 1903 that El Greco "was two centuries ahead of his time; that is why painters, Manet among them, thought so much of him". French novelist Maurice Barrès wrote in 1912 that El Greco was "a great man, an inconceivably great genius", defending him with such ardor that it even led him to disparage Velázquez.
A 1914 Literary Digest article noted, El Greco was "ranked by some critics not only as Spain's greatest artist, but as one of the five or six greatest painters of all time". According to American artist William Alexander Griffith, in 1925, El Greco was everywhere regarded as one of the greatest artists of all time, having achieved the high honor of a classification and is called the "supreme example of the baroque in painting". British art critics Robert Byron and David Talbot Rice wrote in 1928 how El Greco might end up being as highly regarded as Raphael in the future. In 1930, Spanish art historian and architect José Pijoán wrote that El Greco was "greatest master that Spain and the world have had" and considered him the "demigod of the advanced schools" because of his revolutionary approach to form and reality. English author William Somerset Maugham, in 1938, wrote "I do not doubt that he was one of the greatest painters that ever lived. I think The Burial of the Count of Orgaz is one of the greatest pictures in the world". Spanish art historian José Camón Aznar regarded him "the most genial painter in all history", whereas American art historian Harold Edwin Wethey saw him as "one of the half-dozen greatest painters of all time". Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloaga called El Greco "the greatest painter there ever was".
During the same period, other researchers developed alternative, more radical theories. The ophthalmologists August Goldschmidt and Germán Beritens argued that El Greco painted such elongated human figures because he had vision problems (possibly progressive astigmatism or strabismus) that made him see bodies longer than they were, and at an angle to the perpendicular; the physician Arturo Perera, however, attributed this style to the use of marijuana. Michael Kimmelman, a reviewer for The New York Times, stated that "to Greeks [El Greco] became the quintessential Greek painter; to the Spanish, the quintessential Spaniard".
Epitomizing the consensus of El Greco's impact, Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, said in April 1980 that El Greco was "the most extraordinary painter that ever came along back then" and that he was "maybe three or four centuries ahead of his time". Historian Eric Storm, who sees the "rediscovery" of El Greco "as one of the most important events of its kind in art history" summarized:
Thanks to authors such as Meier-Graefe and groundbreaking modern artists like Picasso, Franz Marc, and Kandinsky, in less than fifty years El Greco was eventually proclaimed to be one of the greatest painters ever.Julius Meier-Grafe, indeed, considered El Greco greater than Velázquez, believing the latter to simply be a "faint reflection" of the former. He placed El Greco as the immediate precursor to French impressionism and an innovative colorist who anticipated painters like Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne.
In 2003, Japanese art historian Yasunari Kitaura noted that El Greco is considered "one of the greatest painters ever in the history of universal art". He considered his art as being firmly rooted in a "prestigious artistic genealogy" prototype, which El Greco greatly outdoes, transcends and surpasses. In 2020, art critic Sebastian Smee added that: "Without El Greco, Picasso's early Blue and Rose periods are hard to imagine".
