“The most modern of Old Masters” declares a text panel at the beginning of this fall’s stunning El Greco retrospective at the Metropolitan. Hyperbole, maybe, but it’s easy to agree when we become engaged by this enigmatic artist’s moody, ecstatic devotional paintings, losing ourselves in eye-popping color and crackling tonal shifts, brittle planes and unstable spaces or savoring the expressive exaggerations of confrontational portraits, instead of deciphering iconography or wondering about the identity of the sitters. No matter how much we know about the historical context of these pictures, no matter how firm a grip we have on the permutations of painting in the late sixteenth century, it can be difficult to see El Greco’s pictures solely as products of their own time. The passionate touch (especially in the late work), the moonstruck brights and bottomless blacks, the agitated drawing, and above all, the immediacy, intensity, and unignorable individuality of his work can seem more the result of a modern desire for self-expression than a response to Counter Reformation requirements for evoking religious fervor.

It’s possible that El Greco’s atemporal modernity is particularly conspicuous at the moment because of the timing of the Metropolitan’s exhibition,¹ which arrived hard on the heels of MOMA’s Max Beckmann retrospective. With the Beckmann show fresh in one’s mind, it is difficult to look at El Greco’s mature work and not think about the curious likenesses between the efforts of these ostensibly very different painters: one an introspective twentieth-century Northerner bent