Four centuries after his death, El Greco still fascinates

It has been 400 years since Domenikos Theotokopoulos died, in 1614, and in Spain there have been major celebrations of his work. In the US, the anniversary of the artist known as El Greco has been treated less lavishly. The two phenomena are related: New York's Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery in Washington lent important works to Spanish exhibitions, which meant neither could mount a major show.

But the artist is too popular - and too rewarding - to be entirely neglected, so now, late in the year, the Met and the National Gallery have mounted small exhibitions. Both shows are contained in a single room, both centre on one or two pieces already familiar to and beloved by audiences, and both are filled out with lesser works, in some cases by the studio of El Greco, who was a savvy entrepreneur and maintained a busy business of making copies of his own works.

And yet both are potent if circumscribed overviews. "El Greco in New York" is billed as "a mini-retrospective", with works from the Met and the Hispanic Society of America, and is dominated by two masterpieces, View of Toledo and The Vision of Saint John.

The National Gallery's "El Greco in the National Gallery of Art and Washington-Area Collections" draws on its own rich holdings, plus works from Dumbarton Oaks and the Phillips Collection in Washington and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The newly restored Saint Martin and the Beggar and the magnificent Laocoon preside over this exhibition.

Neither exhibition includes work from the artist's earliest period, when he was an icon painter in Crete. They take up the thread with his move to Italy, where he spent time in Venice and Rome, and began working in a style influenced by Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto.

These early works often feel fussy and mannered, with a nervous energy that hasn't yet been incorporated into the expressive freedom of his later works. Christ Cleansing the Temple, from the National Gallery, was probably painted before 1570, when he was working in Venice, and its brilliant colours and serpentine figures connect it to that milieu; but although rich in narrative drama, it also feels cluttered and overstuffed, a painting clamouring to be noticed and failing at the same time.