Art in The Great Gatsby

Domenikos Theotocopoulos was born in 1541 on the island of Crete. His first training must have been from a Cretan artist still working in the Byzantine tradition. Shortly after 1560, El Greco arrived in Venice and absorbed the lessons of the Renaissance masters Titian and Tintoretto. By 1570, El Greco had gone to Rome and came to know the art of other masters (i.e. Raphael, Michelangelo). Soon thereafter, he came to know the Central Italian Mannerists. In 1576, El Greco moved to Spain, and he lived in Toledo for the rest of his life. The Spaniards called him El Greco (the Greek) because he always signed his canvases using his Greek signature (seen above). He became active in reforming the Catholic Church, and it is because of the Counter Reformation in Spain that El Greco's paintings are so religious in subject matter. El Greco's work has an "exalted emotionalism," and the spirituality of his work was a response primarily to mysticism.

El Greco's most exalted work is The Burial of Count Orgaz. This huge canvas honors a medieval patron so pious that St. Stephen and St. Augustine appear at his funeral and are the two individuals lowering Count Orgaz into his grave. To the observer, this painting, when its original setting, the church of Ste. Tome, has "three levels of reality." There is the actual grave which is directly below the painting; the picture's reenactment of the burial; and the "celestial glory" above.

This is El Greco's The Burial of Court Orgaz and a detail is on the right.

After 1600, El Greco's style began to distort more light, space, and form. His painting, View of Toledo is hardly a realistic representation of the city. It displays more of an expression of his feelings towards his adopted home. The dramatic landscape depicted in this painting influenced the expressionist painters of the 1900s including Henri Matisse and Oskar Kokoschka. El Greco died in Spain in 1614.

The image above is El Greco's View of Toledo, which he painted in 1597. (Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

El Greco's mature work is a style of the Venetian mannerism. El Greco's version of mannerism is characterized by graceful, elongated form and metallic colors with white highlights. These characteristics can be seen in The Burial of Count Orgaz. Although El Greco intentionally elongated and distorted form to emphasize the spiritual quality of a figure or event, his portraits of nobles and intellectuals are elegant and realistic. His saints, on the other hand, are ghostly creations of his imagination.

Fitzgerald references El Greco in The Great Gatsby after Gatsby's death.

"I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house--the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one cares" (185).

In this context, Fitzgerald describes the shallowness and selfishness of the people of the 1920s. The responses of various people to the news of Gatsby's murder are similar to the contorted indifference in El Greco's distorted paintings in that "no one cares" and Nick decides to stereotype all Easterners with these shallow characteristics.