Lecture: El Greco: Ambition and Defiance
May 15, 6:15 pm–7:15 pm
Lubar Auditorium
Deepen your engagement with The Brilliance of the Spanish World in a lecture by Rebecca J. Long, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Curator of Painting and Sculpture of Europe. Since El Greco’s death, writers, critics, and other observers have struggled with how and where to situate him. Was he a Byzantine icon painter transformed by the artistic revolution of the Italian Renaissance? A social climber desperately seeking noble patronage? Was he Greek, Italian, or Spanish? This lecture looks to his works themselves for answers, providing new insights into El Greco’s legacy and including artworks featured in the exhibition The Brilliance of the Spanish World.
This drop-in experience is included with Museum admission and is free for Members. Museum admission is pay-what-you-wish on Thursday nights from 4 to 8 p.m.
The Milwaukee Art Museum is grateful to its exhibition sponsors.
About Rebecca Long
Rebecca J. Long is the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture of Europe at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she oversees Spanish and Italian art before 1750. Before joining the Art Institute in 2015, she served as Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. She has held research fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, NYU’s Villa La Pietra, and Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti. She served as an adjunct professor of art history at Hunter College, Fashion Institute of Technology, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, University of Louisville, and Northwestern University. She was most recently the curator of the exhibition El Greco: Ambition and Defiance (Grand Palais, Paris, 2019–Chicago, 2020). Her next exhibition focuses on the career of Francisco de Zurbarán, in partnership with The National Gallery in London and Musée du Louvre (2026–7).
Image: El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) (Greek, 1541–1614, active in Italy and Spain), Saint Jerome (detail), ca. 1600. Oil on canvas. 80 × 65 cm. Courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America, New York
