El Greco at Bozar, Brussels

El Greco’s ’The Crucifixion’ (c 1610-1614)

Bozar (French “beaux arts”), Victor Horta’s deco palace in Brussels, has hosted some spectacular recent exhibitions across its geometric, cavernous, eccentric spaces. The European Union’s Spanish presidency is the impetus for the latest, a tightly focused overview of El Greco assembled from collections in Madrid and Toledo. The Spanish-Greek painter’s dynamic elongated figures and quickened, arrow-like compositions look stunning in these grand, angular galleries: at once modern – Picasso called El Greco “a cubist in construction” – and, in an installation of dramatic black-outs, sharp spotlights and arched echoing interiors, profoundly of the Iberian Counter-Reformation.

Although in range and quality the 40 paintings here cannot compete with the National Gallery/Metropolitan Museum 2003-2004 El Greco blockbuster, there are exceptional works from every period, including the complete canvases comprising the artist’s final, unfinished “Apostles” series (London and New York showed just three). Best of all, Bozar itself remains a secret: astonishingly, it is possible here to stand alone, silent, uncrushed and unhurried, before masterpiece after masterpiece in a way unimaginable in an Old Master show in Europe’s bigger capitals.

The experience allows a more intimate, gradual and nuanced response to El Greco’s idiosyncratic style. From afar, the Escorial palace’s “Saint Ildefonso”, for example, mesmerises for its theatricality – the calm, solemn saint set against a turbulent sky whose horizon is artificially lowered to monumentalise the composition, the extreme verticality accentuating the implication of mystic ascent. Up close, however, you see how complex mark-making determines the radiant effect – intricate byzantine gold/white contrasts, flowers and birds embroidered on Ildefonso’s chasuble dissolving into painterly patterns, spirals, smudges – impressionistic, even abstract in their freedom. Those broken, tremulous brushstrokes, part of his emotional extravagance, were what drew the modernists to El Greco after his fall into obscurity in the three centuries following his death in 1614. Here, announced the German expressionists, was an artist who felt life’s “mystical inner construction, which is the problem of our generation”.

This is one reason for El Greco’s long influence as a portraitist. Bozar’s stillness allows a dizzying one-to-one encounter with the dawn of Spanish psychological portraiture, notably in the section containing just two paintings – the Prado’s “Don Rodrigo de la Fuente”, depicting a celebrated doctor, sombre and watchful, and Toledo’s “Antonio de Covarrubias”, a warm study of a leading humanist whom El Greco recorded as “a miracle of nature ... infinite kindness and patience which is so splendid that it disturbs the gaze and prevents me from going forward”. Combining thick impastos, meticulous application for lips, beard, slightly asymmetrical eyes, with skimming brushstrokes, he blurs Covarrubias’s face as if animated, quivering with thought, while both portraits achieve deep human gravitas in the restricted palette of black, white and flesh tones. That stark, concentrated, essentialist effect of subjects silhouetted against dark abstract grounds characterises Spanish portraiture from Velázquez and Goya to Picasso.

How El Greco arrived at his intuitive, distorted style, disregarding classical proportion for expressive effect and visionary treatment of space, is a journey unique in art history – well-known but sparklingly retold here. He was born in 1541 in Crete, then a Venetian dominion but still Byzantine in cultural outlook, with pictorial production limited to icons. He began his career in an icon workshop before travelling to Venice in 1567. The tentative “Last Supper” and “ Adoration of the Magi” show him struggling to master western figuration, while enthralled by the colourists Titian and Tintoretto. Proceeding to Rome in 1570, he won few friends – in a city still under the spell of Michelangelo, El Greco “the Greek” newcomer boasted that he could redo the Sistine Chapel more decoratively. He responded ambivalently to Rome: “Christ Healing the Blind” is defiantly indebted to Tintoretto in its rich colour, and some compositional details, but the classical urban view and volumised figures reflect the papal city’s influence nonetheless.

In 1576, lured by hope of work on Phillip II’s Escorial, El Greco moved to Spain. “The Disrobing of Christ” for Toledo cathedral audaciously synthesises his Italian experience with Spanish art’s extreme realism and spirituality. The monumentality is Roman, the centrality of colour, with Christ’s blood-red robe gleaming like a jewel, Venetian, but the appeal to the senses, as if we are witnessing a real event – clamouring soldiers in cold armour, a nail crunched into the cross, the claustrophobic viewpoint, with figures compressed into shallow space evocative of the high relief polychrome sculptures seen at London’s National Gallery last year – belongs definitively to the Spanish Counter-Reformation.

Nevertheless, El Greco got into trouble for placing the soldiers’ heads higher than Christ’s; paid one-third of what he asked, he was not commissioned by the cathedral again. Failing also to find favour with Phillip, he settled in Toledo to produce works for monasteries and private devotion, soon in such demand that a factory of assistants flourished. Increasingly now, as his 20th-century champion Aldous Huxley noted, he “used natural objects as the raw material out of which ... he might create his own world of pictorial forms in pictorial space under pictorial illumination”.

“Saint Francis and Brother Leo Meditating on Death” typifies that balance of naturalism – the monk’s stigmatised hand holding the yellowed skull – and spiritual expressiveness: especially in the shaft of light bursting through the clouds, illuminating the monochromatic setting. The painting was so admired that his studio produced 40 copies: though lacking El Greco’s intense, flurried strokes, the two versions here demonstrate the compelling composition.

Thus El Greco stepped over his shadow from east to western Europe, developing ever greater freedom. His mannerist inventions reached their peak in compositions such as the Metropolitan’s “The Opening of the Fifth Seal” – key influence on Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles” – and the Prado’s three-metre “Adoration of the Shepherds”. These are not here, but similar boldness at reduced scale is evident in the Illescas roundels depicting Mary in different aspects, from young girl to heavenly queen. The angel in “The Annunciation” sweeps dynamically round the canvas’s circular perimeter, enhancing the effect of instability and surprise; in “The Nativity” the foreshortened head of an ox, its horn echoing the curving format, surveys the white light emanating from the baby which makes the Virgin’s crimson gown glow like a candle.

El Greco’s late colour, when he uses it, is pure and brilliant – transparent as stained glass in the “Apostles” series, where it is magnificently combined with the byzantine frontalism of his youth in “Christ as Saviour”. Forms lose their mass and texture, and light becomes incandescent, no longer indicating time of day – eternal not temporal, and painted in absolute belief in art’s own transcendence and immortality.

El Greco, Bozar, Brussels, until May 9. www.bozar.be