- The first time I saw it was the
- first time I came to the Metropolitan Museum when I was oh, about ten years old, I think.
- I came with my mother. We wandered around the paintings galleries a bit. I was particularly struck by this
- one painting. I always thought of paintings as being…they reproduced
- reality and that was
- what they were all about.
- They were much like a photograph only bigger and with paint on them. And I think seeing this painting,
- I think it was the first picture which attracted me to art, let’s put it that way.
- It is a somewhat sketchy depiction of Toledo, which is a beautiful
- hill town, under an
- extremely dramatic and powerful sky during
- a thunderstorm. When I looked at this picture, I recognized that an artist not only was present,
- but was an interpreter, emotionally, in terms of
- mood, in terms of drama. If you ever stand outside during a thunderstorm
- and you look at the sky and you look at the
- brilliance of the lightning
- on buildings or trees,
- I think a lot of that is captured here. It was the one picture that sort of
- stayed in my mind for a number of years and once in a long
- while I’d come to the Museum and
- I would always go back to that painting. So in a way it created my view of art.
- To me the works of art that have the greatest impact are the ones that begin with reality
- and expand on the experience of reality. Even though
- a sky during a thunderstorm is a beautiful, dramatic
- sight, they rarely look like this.
- This seems to me enhancing
- even that extreme to a further level of expression.
- As an art historian and a curator,
- I do spend a lot of time dissecting ideas and trying to form
- coherent views about them.
- As someone who enjoys works of art as a normal person, let’s say, I tend to
- be more attracted to works of art that
- strike me immediately. I can’t say that there have been
- a lot of works of art that I’ve
- grown to love. There are
- works of art that I’ve grown to admire and understand. Usually
- the works of art that I love, I loved when I saw them
- right away. And I think that that remains true, and
- it did with this and it does today.
My First TimeGeorge Goldner
View of Toledo
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) (Greek)
Oil on canvas
H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100.6)
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) (Greek)
Oil on canvas
H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100.6)
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