National Gallery Of Art | Audio

November 2014 - Richard L. Kagan, Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor Emeritus of History and Academy Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University. The 400th anniversary of the death of Domenikos Theotokopoulos, universally known as El Greco (1541-1614), is remembered at the National Gallery of Art with an exhibition of 11 paintings from the Gallery, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. With seven paintings by El Greco, the Gallery has one of the largest collections of his work in the United States, made possible by the generosity of early benefactors Andrew W. Mellon, Samuel H. Kress, Joseph Widener, and Chester Dale. Ignored for centuries, El Greco was rediscovered in Spain by Picasso and other artists at the close of the 19th century. His fame spread quickly to the United States, where artists, critics, and collectors regarded his idiosyncratic style of painting as a precursor of the latest trends in modern art. While El Greco continued to h