MUNICH.- El Greco’s ‘The Disrobing of Christ’ is the first work from the Alte Pinakothek to be shown at the Pinakothek der Moderne. This guest appearance highlights a noteworthy phenomenon – around 1910, a young generation of Expressionist painters enthusiastically celebrated El Greco as a prophet of Modernism.

Munich contributed significantly to promoting this view of El Greco. ‘The Disrobing of Christ’ had already been acquired for the Alte Pinakothek in 1909 and, in 1911, was shown at the influential exhibition of works from the Nemes Collection along with other paintings by El Greco. During the partial closure of the Alte Pinakothek due to renovation work, this picture – that is very popular among visitors – has now been placed next to a number of works by Expressionist artists who indentified with El Greco’s painting in particular. These include Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Robert Delaunay, Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Franz Marc, among others.

El Greco in Munich
Doménikos Theotokopoulos, known as El Greco (‘The Greek’), was born in 1541 on Crete but lived most of his life in Spain . This year, the 400th anniversary of the artist’s death on 7 April 1614 has been marked around the world.

The Munich version of ‘The Disrobing of Christ’ is a replica in a smaller format of the famous altar painting in the sacristy of Toledo cathedral. It was acquired in 1909 by the then director of the Staatliche Galerien in Bayern, Hugo von Tschudi, and became an integral part of the permanent collection straight away. Even then, it was regarded as the best of all the replicas known at that time. Between June 1911 and January 1912 the picture hung in the legendary exhibition of works from the collection of the Hungarian Marcell Nemes in the Spanish Room at the Alte Pinakothek, alongside eight paintings by El Greco in Nemes’ possession and El Greco’s ‘Lacoön’ (now in The National Gallery, Washington), on loan from another private collection. Many artists gained their first concrete impression of El Greco’s art through ‘The Disrobing of Christ’ and the Nemes exhibition in Munich .

El Greco and Expressionism
A number of artists interpreted characteristics in El Greco’s works, such as the prolonged bodies, the idiosyncratic spaces no longer depicted in an illusionary manner and the dramatically flickering use of light, as Expressionist. Artists took El Greco to be a visionary outsider and considered his stylistic Mannerism a justifiable and ingenious form of proto-Expressionism.

EL GRECO EXPRESSIVE juxtaposes ‘The Disrobing of Christ’ with seven works by Expressionist and Post-Expressionst artists. With ‘ Tyrol ’ by Franz Marc, these include a masterpiece from the ‘Blue Rider’. Less well-known artists such as the Dutchman Adriaan Korteweg or Heinrich Maria Davringhausen from the Rhineland can also be discovered anew. Davringhausen’s spectacular ‘Female Nude in Architectural Setting’ of 1916 was recently acquired with the support of PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne e.V. and is now being shown at the Pinakothek der Moderne for the first time as part of this exhibition.

Curators: Dr. Elisabeth Hipp, Dr. Oliver Kase