Question: Wh was one of Picasso's friends who acquired one of El Greco's masterpieces??
About the article "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", section "Influence of El Greco".

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In 1907, when Picasso began to work on "Les Demoiselles", one of the old master painters he greatly admired was El Greco (1541–1614).
At the time El Greco was largely obscure and under-appreciated.
Picasso's friend Ignacio Zuloaga (1870–1945) acquired El Greco's masterpiece, the "Opening of the Fifth Seal", in 1897 for 1000 pesetas.
While Picasso was working on , he visited his friend Ignacio Zuloaga in his studio in Paris and studied El Greco's "Opening of the Fifth Seal."
The relation between and the "Opening of the Fifth Seal" was pinpointed in the early 1980s, when the stylistic similarities and the relationship between the motifs and visually identifying qualities of both works were analysed.
El Greco's painting which Picasso studied over and over in Zuloaga's house inspired not only the size, format, and composition of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" but it inspired its apocalyptic power.
Later, speaking of the work to Dor de la Souchère in Antibes, Picasso said: "In any case, only the execution counts.
From this point of view, it is correct to say that Cubism has a Spanish origin and that I invented Cubism.
We must look for the Spanish influence in Cézanne.
Things themselves necessitate it, the influence of El Greco, a Venetian painter, on him.
But his structure is Cubist.
"The relationship of the painting to other group portraits in the Western tradition, such as "Diana and Callisto" by Titian (1488–1576), and the same subject by Rubens (1577–1640), in the Prado, has also been discussed.
The Disrobing of Christ or El Expolio (Latin: Exspolĭum) is a painting begun in the summer of 1577 and completed in the spring of 1579 for the High Altar of the sacristy of the Cathedral of Toledo, where it still normally hangs.
In late 2013 it was on temporary display at the Prado in Madrid (with the other El Grecos), following a period of cleaning and conservation work there; it is due to return to Toledo in 2014.
It is one of El Greco's most famous works.
A document dated July 2, 1577 which refers to this painting is the earliest record of El Greco's presence in Spain.
The commission for the painting was secured thanks to El Greco's friendship from Rome with Luis, the son of Diego de Castilla, the dean of the Cathedral of Toledo.
De Castilla senior also arranged El Greco's other major commission, on which he worked simultaneously, the paintings for the Toledan church of "Santo Domingo el Antiguo".  
In 1899 Picasso rejected academic study and joined a circle of avant-garde artists and writers known as "modernistes" or "decadentes".
Meeting at Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona, they assimilated trends such as symbolism and Art nouveau, characterized by contour lines, simplified form and unnatural colors.
Yet, in addition to the influence of Théophile Steinlen and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, that of Francisco Goya and El Greco can be seen in Picasso's work of the period.
A significant innovation of El Greco's later works is the interweaving of form and space; a reciprocal relationship is developed between the two that unifies the painted surface.
This interweaving would re-emerge three centuries later in the works of Cézanne and Picasso.
Adapting these style, the artist produced numerous portraits of friends such as Carlos Casagemas and Jaime Sabartès (Sabartès Seated).
The modernists also devoted themselves to political anarchy and other social causes, including sympathy for the poor, denizens and the underclass; subjects that would soon emerge in the paintings of Picasso's blue period (a color associated with despair and melancholy, blue was commonly used in Symbolist painting).
The first artist who seems to have noticed the structural code built into the morphology of late El Greco was Paul Cézanne, one of the forerunners of Cubism.
Comparative morphological analyses of the two painters works reveal common elements: the distortion of the human body, the reddish and unworked backgrounds, and the similarities in the rendering of space.
According to Brown, "Cézanne and El Greco are spiritual brothers despite the centuries which separate them".
Fry observed that Cézanne drew from "his great discovery of the permeation of every part of the design with a uniform and continuous plastic theme".
In 1904 Picasso moved to Paris, where the work of post-impressionist painters Van Gogh, Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin were exhibited at galleries and Salons.
Rapidly assimilating these influences, he adapted to new styles and techniques, as the use of bright unmixed colors.
The Symbolists, and Pablo Picasso during his Blue Period, drew on the cool tonality of El Greco and the anatomy of his ascetic figures.
While Picasso was working on , he visited his friend Ignacio Zuloaga in his Parisian atelier and studied El Greco's "Opening of the Fifth Seal" (owned by Zuloaga since 1897).
The relation between and the "Opening of the Fifth Seal" was pinpointed in the early 1980s, when the stylistic similarities and the relationship between the motifs of both works were analysed.
Art historian Ron Johnson was the first to focus on the relationship between the two paintings.
According to John Richardson, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" "turns out to have a few more answers to give once we realize that the painting owes at least as much to El Greco as Cézanne".
Picasso's Rose Period turns toward the theme of the fairground and circus performers; subjects often depicted in Post-Impressionist, romantic and symbolist art and verse (from Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Daumier and Seurat), where melancholy and social alienation pervade the saltimbanque.
Corresponding to the tone of Picasso, acrobats represent both mystery and enchantment in the poems of Guillaume Apollinaire written in the same period.
In 1906, working at the Bateau Lavoir, Picasso continued to explore new directions; portraying monumental female figures standing in abstract interior spaces.
Now, in addition to the bathers of Cézanne, Spanish romanesque art and Iberian sculpture provide an prominent influences for Picasso.
Around this time he also created a self-portrait depicting himself as something of a latter-day Cézanne. 
Art historian Max Dvořák was the first scholar to connect El Greco's art with Mannerism and Antinaturalism.
Modern scholars characterize El Greco's theory as "typically Mannerist" and pinpoint its sources in the Neoplatonism of the Renaissance.
According to Brown, the painter endeavored to create a sophisticated form of art.
Nicholas Penny, senior curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, asserts that "once in Spain, El Greco was able to create a style of his own - one that disavowed most of the descriptive ambitions of painting".
In his mature works El Greco demonstrated a characteristic tendency to dramatize rather than to describe.
The strong spiritual emotion transfers from painting directly to the audience.
According to Pacheco, El Greco's perturbed, violent and at times seemingly careless-in-execution art was due to a studied effort to acquire a freedom of style.
The preference of El Greco for very tall and slender figures and elongated compositions, which served both the expressive purposes and the aesthetic principles of the master, led him to disregard the laws of nature and elongate his compositions more and more, particularly when they were destined for altarpieces.
The anatomy of the human body becomes even more otherworldly in the painter's mature works.
For example, for the "Virgin of the Immaculate Conception" that he painted for the side-chapel of Isabella Oballe in the church of Saint Vincent in Toledo (1607–1613), El Greco asked to lengthen the altarpiece itself by another 1.5 feet "because in this way the form will be perfect and not reduced, which is the worst thing that can happen to a figure'".
The minutes concerning the commission, which were composed by the personnel of the municipality, describe El Greco as "one of the greatest men in both this kingdom and outside it".
A significant innovation of El Greco's mature works is the interweaving between form and space; a reciprocal relationship is developed between them which completely unifies the painting surface.
This interweaving would re-emerge three centuries later in Cézanne's and Picasso's works.
Another characteristic of El Greco's mature style is the use of light.
As Brown notes, "each figure seems to carry its own light within or reflects the light that emanates from an unseen source".
Fernando Marias and Agustín Bustamante García, the scholars who transcribed El Greco's handwritten notes, connect the power that the painter gives to light with the ideas underlying Christian Neo-Platonism.
The later works of the painter turn this use of light into glowing colors.
In "The Vision of Saint John" and the "Fifth Seal of the Apocalypse" the scenes owe their power to this otherworldly stormy light, which reveals their mystic character.
The renowned "View of Toledo" (c. 1600) also acquires its visionary character because of this stormy light.
The grey-blue clouds are split by lightning bolts, which vividly highlight the noble buildings of the city.
His last landscape, "View and Plan of Toledo", is almost like a vision, all of the buildings painted glistening white.
According to Wethey, in his surviving landscapes, "El Greco demonstrated his characteristic tendency to dramatize rather than to describe".
Professor Nicos Hadjinicolaou notes the manner in which El Greco could adjust his style in accordance with his surroundings and stresses the importance of Toledo for the complete development of El Greco's mature style.
Wethey asserts that "although Greek by descent and Italian by artistic preparation, the artist became so immersed in the religious environment of Spain that he became the most vital visual representative of Spanish mysticism".
The same scholar believes that in El Greco's mature works "the devotional intensity of mood reflects the religious spirit of Roman Catholic Spain in the period of the Counter-Reformation".
El Greco often produces an open pipe between Earth and Heaven in his paintings.
"The Annunciation" is one example of this spiritual conduit being present.
The people, clouds, and other objects in many of his paintings open away from a central, empty passageway between the ground and the upper spiritual firmament.
This is sometimes a subtle concavity in fabrics that implies a ghostly passageway that leads vertically from the people at the bottom to the angels at the top of the paintings.
In other paintings, this central cylinder of open space is very prominent, providing a distinctive visionary style, due to the deep insights of the pious painter.
These paintings imply that El Greco, himself, can see the holy path from common human existence toward a very real Heaven.
El Greco excelled also as a portraitist, mainly of ecclesiastics or gentlemen, who was able not only to record a sitter's features but to convey his character.
Although he was primarily a painter of religious subjects, his portraits, though less numerous, are equally high in quality.
Two of his late works are the portraits of "Fray Felix Hortensio Paravicino" (1609) and "Cardinal Don Fernando Niño de Guevara" (c. 1600).
Both are seated, as was customary in portraits presenting important ecclesiastics.
Wethey says that "by such simple means, the artist created a memorable characterization that places him in the highest rank as a portraitist, along with Titian and Rembrandt". 
Technique and style.
The primacy of imagination and intuition over the subjective character of creation was a fundamental principle of El Greco's style.
El Greco discarded classicist criteria such as measure and proportion.
He believed that grace is the supreme quest of art, but the painter achieves grace only if he manages to solve the most complex problems with obvious ease.
El Greco regarded color as the most important and the most ungovernable element of painting, and declared that color had primacy over form.
Francisco Pacheco, a painter and theoretician who visited El Greco in 1611, wrote that the painter liked "the colors crude and unmixed in great blots as a boastful display of his dexterity" and that "he believed in constant repainting and retouching in order to make the broad masses tell flat as in nature".
Art historian Max Dvořák was the first scholar to connect El Greco's art with Mannerism and Antinaturalism.
Modern scholars characterize El Greco's theory as "typically Mannerist" and pinpoint its sources in the Neoplatonism of the Renaissance.
Jonathan Brown believes that El Greco endeavored to create a sophisticated form of art; according to Nicholas Penny "once in Spain, El Greco was able to create a style of his own—one that disavowed most of the descriptive ambitions of painting".
In his mature works El Greco demonstrated a characteristic tendency to dramatize rather than to describe.
The strong spiritual emotion transfers from painting directly to the audience.
According to Pacheco, El Greco's perturbed, violent and at times seemingly careless-in-execution art was due to a studied effort to acquire a freedom of style.
El Greco's preference for exceptionally tall and slender figures and elongated compositions, which served both his expressive purposes and aesthetic principles, led him to disregard the laws of nature and elongate his compositions to ever greater extents, particularly when they were destined for altarpieces.
The anatomy of the human body becomes even more otherworldly in El Greco's mature works; for "The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception" El Greco asked to lengthen the altarpiece itself by another "because in this way the form will be perfect and not reduced, which is the worst thing that can happen to a figure'".
A significant innovation of El Greco's mature works is the interweaving between form and space; a reciprocal relationship is developed between the two which completely unifies the painting surface.
This interweaving would re-emerge three centuries later in the works of Cézanne and Picasso.
Another characteristic of El Greco's mature style is the use of light.
As Jonathan Brown notes, "each figure seems to carry its own light within or reflects the light that emanates from an unseen source".
Fernando Marias and Agustín Bustamante García, the scholars who transcribed El Greco's handwritten notes, connect the power that the painter gives to light with the ideas underlying Christian Neo-Platonism.
Modern scholarly research emphasizes the importance of Toledo for the complete development of El Greco's mature style and stresses the painter's ability to adjust his style in accordance with his surroundings.
Harold Wethey asserts that "although Greek by descent and Italian by artistic preparation, the artist became so immersed in the religious environment of Spain that he became the most vital visual representative of Spanish mysticism".
He believes that in El Greco's mature works "the devotional intensity of mood reflects the religious spirit of Roman Catholic Spain in the period of the Counter-Reformation".
El Greco also excelled as a portraitist, able not only to record a sitter's features but also to convey their character.
His portraits are fewer in number than his religious paintings, but are of equally high quality.
Wethey says that "by such simple means, the artist created a memorable characterization that places him in the highest rank as a portraitist, along with Titian and Rembrandt".