The Disrobing of Christ

When Hugo von Tschudi, director of the Bavarian state galleries, bought this canvas from a Paris dealer in 1909, El Greco was just being rediscovered by modern painters and critics. From June 1911 to January 1912 it hung in the Spanish room of the Alte Pinakothek beside eight El Grecos lent by the Hungarian collector Marczell von Nemes. A year later the Blue Rider almanac, the book the painters Kandinsky and Franz Marc edited in Munich, reproduced a painting by El Greco alongside the new art it championed.

The design itself comes from the big altarpiece El Greco painted between 1577 and 1579 for the sacristy of Toledo Cathedral. The museum treats this smaller canvas as his own later replica, painted with help from his workshop, and the scholar Harold Wethey counted 19 versions of the composition. Christ in crimson stands at the centre, hand on his breast, eyes raised. A man in green grabs his robe, and a knight in black armour stands close by. Lower left are the three Marys, the Magdalene turned away from us in yellow-gold. Lower right a workman bores a hole in the cross, and a few pebbles lie at Christ's feet.