Dominick the Greek

Last week, while the skirted Evzones hammered at Mussolini's Albanian Army, the greatest Greek since antiquity did his belated bit for Greece. For a great Greek, he was practically a modern, having been born on the island of Crete exactly 400 years ago. His name: Domenikos Theotokopoulos, nicknamed El Greco ("The Greek"). His aid to embattled Greece: a one-man show (the first and finest in the U. S. in many years) of 18 of his paintings at Manhattan's Knoedler Galleries, the proceeds to go to the Greek War Relief Association. The fanatic fire of his ghostlike saints and flame-licked madonnas made many a gallerygoer stop, look, and look again.

Like many a later Greek, Domenikos Theotokopoulos as a young man found Greece too small for him, went to seek his fortune elsewhere. But Domenikos Theotokopoulos never forgot he was a Greek. Haughty, aloof and fiercely independent, he went to Italy, studied with Titian, warmed his hands at the dying flames of the Italian Renaissance. He got a little too close to the fire. When he claimed arrogantly that he himself could do a better job on the Last Judgment, than Michelangelo, "a good fellow, but with no idea of painting," Italy's art world became too hot for him. He moved to Spain.

In the dry, rocky town of Toledo, Painter Theotokopoulos found himself on the rip-roaring crest of the Spanish Inquisition. Gaunt Dominican monks prowled the streets, hunting heretics. Middle-aged St. Theresa, businesslike in her hair shirt, wrote, declaimed, founded convents by the dozen. King Philip II's weedy, emaciated aristocrats, shunning the world with proud incompetence, vain of blood and sharp of feature, were furnishing Miguel de Cervantes with ideas for his best-seller Don Quixote.

Domenikos Theotokopoulos didn't like the Inquisition. But he was a devout Catholic, and Toledo's faded, invalid nobles, Quixotic bishops and hagridden monks were pigments for his palette. Himself a mystic, he painted the tortured, visionary aspirations of his subjects, seared the flesh further from their hollow cheeks, elongated their bodies till they looked like trembling candle flames, lit like flickering shadows in the glow of the Inquisition. The best painter in all Spain, Theotokopoulos became wealthy, got himself a 24-room palace, a beautiful wife named Dona Jeronima de las Cuevas, a scholar's library, musicians from Venice to play for him at mealtimes. But to the Spaniards he was never a real Spaniard. They called him, condescendingly, ''El Greco."

Toledo's intellectuals and painters treated him like royalty, but Spain's King Philip II didn't like him, and Toledo's ordinary citizens thought his weird, restive, distorted canvases the work of a madman. Critics suggested that he was astigmatic, if not insane. When he died in 1614 his fame was already on the wane, and soon his greatest paintings were tucked away in dim sacristies and behind altars. The flashy, flattering portraits of brilliant Court-painter Velasquez became the rage, and El Greco was forgotten. Forgotten he remained for nearly 300 years.

By foreigners this foreigner was rediscovered. In the 1870s and '80s, when French Impressionists like Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Sisley were experimenting on new methods of painting light and color, travelers began to notice El Greco again. The famous German critic Julius Meier-Graefe went to Spain to write a book praising Velasquez, wrote one in 1910 praising El Greco instead. French Post-Impressionists like Cezanne, abstractionists like Picasso, studied him for ideas. U. S. collectors began paying fabulous prices for his pictures. Because Europe's great museums had not bothered to secure many of his works, Americans were able to buy some 55 authentic (plus scores of spurious) El Grecos.

Today, Greek-born Domenikos Theotokopoulos is the most modern and still the most discussed of old masters. But of El Greco himself little record remains. No authenticated portrait of him exists. The site of his 24-room palace in Toledo is disputed, and where Domenikos Theotokopoulos' bones were buried no one knows.

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