TOLEDO.- The Minister of Culture, Cesar Antonio Molina and the president of the communities in Castilla-La Mancha, Jose Maria Barreda, have inaugurated the exhibition El Greco. Toledo 1900, organized by the Ministry of Culture.
The exhibition, curated by Ana Carmen Lavin, pretends to make a study of El Greco in his historic context, as well as a reading of the space and time in which his rediscovery was made at the beginning of the 20th Century. After the death of Doménikos Theotokópoulos in 1614, his work was misunderstood and relegated into forgetfulness. But, after a study made by professor Bartolome Cossio, the figure of the artist, born in Greece but who lived and is associated with Toledo, was accepted by in modern times.
The exhibition is being held at the old Convent of Santa Fe, a building that had been closed in 1973, when it ceased being a school, and has now reopened its doors to house this exhibition.
The show includes 40 works of art, 25 of which are originals by El Greco, 8 are from his workshop or copies of his paintings and 7 are by other authors, such as Sorolla, Sanchez Coello, Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo (Velázquez´ son in law) and Luis Tristan.
After a stop in Seville, Valencia and Zaragoza, the exhibition arrived in Toledo with four new paintings incorporated into the show: “Portrait of Queen Marianne of Austria”, by Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo; ‘Bust of Archer Milton Huntington’ by Anna Hyatt; “Portrait of a Young General” by Bartolomeo Passerotti and “Crucified” by Luis Tristan, measuring three meters high.
Along with the canvases, the exhibition includes a collection of photographs dedicated to the painter made by photographer Mariano Moreno which belong to the Photographic Archives of the Instituto de Patrimonio Histórico del Ministerio de Cultura. These have never before been seen in public and are dated at the beginning of the 20th Century. Some of these photographs are real documents from that age as they show the state of conservation in which El Greco´s paintings arrived at the turn of the century.
