An anti-establishment artist with plenty to say, James Ensor's scribblings are just as eccentric as his paintings. As an insight into his whimsical works, here's a selection of Ensor's inner musings – on art, critics and his naughty pug.
"My writings, or self-important swaggerings presaging a final collapse in the filthy swamp”
This is a subtitle that James Ensor used in his writings repeatedly, which should give you some sense of just how eccentric this celebrated Belgian artist was – and what is to follow below. A well-established painter by his later years, Ensor increasingly turned to writing as an additional means of expressing his ideas and opinions – often in the same bizarre, sometimes macabre style that characterises his paintings. An avid letter-writer and regular contributor to journals and newspapers, his surviving texts cover art criticism, family stories, satirical reviews and philosophical musings. His dark humour and unique perspective offer us another insight into the macabre and enigmatic spectacles in his paintings.
On art...
“A correct line cannot inspire lofty feelings. It is the enemy of genius, incapable of expressing passion, anxiety, struggle, sorrow, enthusiasm, poetry.”
Attending art school in Brussels as a young man, Ensor failed to impress his teachers with his unusual use of colour and light. In a sketch he wrote summarising his time at the Academy, the professors complain that the student "does the opposite of what [he is] told". In the letter quoted above, written to his friend Pol de Mont in late 1894 or early 1895, Ensor affirms his belief in the power of bold experimentation in art; later on in the same paragraph, he expresses his huge admiration for the work of the composer Richard Wagner.
“Cannoniers to your guns! Brace at your batteries! Blast night and day... Art clears a path by means of cannon shots.”
Ensor's art was dismissed by critics and the public for much of his early career. By the 1900s he was well on the way to achieving a respected place within the Belgian artistic canon, but he remained as rebellious and opinionated as when he was a struggling, marginalised oddity. The lines above are part of an emphatic call to arms Ensor wrote in the 1900s, encouraging his fellow artists to defend artistic freedom and pursue innovation.
“Oh, beautiful modernity! What crimes are committed in your name!”
Over the course of his life, Ensor campaigned to preserve several historic buildings in Ostend, including the old docks and a church tower. According to Ensor scholar Herwig Todts, his efforts met with varying success, causing him to issue the plaintive cry above on more than one occasion.
‘’The artist must invent his style, and each new work demands its own.”
Written in a letter to the art critic André de Ridder, this bold statement from Ensor accounts for the notable diversity of his output; he left behind paintings, writings, compositions, etchings and even crayon drawings.
On science...
“Let us all promptly praise the great Einstein and his relative orders, but condemn algebraism and its square roots, the surveyors and their cubic reasons. I say that the world is round...”
In early 1933, Ensor had an improbable meeting with Albert Einstein, when the latter passed through Belgium after fleeing Germany. From these later writings, it appears that Einstein's theories did not altogether impress the artist.
On critics...
“Why satisfy the vile desire of the crowd... a desire without nobility, a curiosity that weighs heavily on us, the super-sensitive. Let us resist communion with the mob! To be artists, let us live in hiding!”
Facing an onslaught of critical and public disparagement, Ensor unsurprisingly sometimes lashed out at his detractors in his writing. Here, he makes a not-entirely-convincing case for ignoring the opinions of all non-artists and shunning public approval.
“Disparagement beats down on me like hail. My umbrella is always to hand; I’m abused, I’m insulted, I exist, I’m mad, I’m simpleminded, I’m nasty, wicked, incapable, ignorant, a creampuff gone rotten.”
Ensor wrote this in his later years, looking back at the ways critics had received him as a young painter.
On his relationships...
“Undoubtedly, the artist doesn’t like women because he is always abusing them in his compositions.”
This was written in a letter to Ensor's friend, Pol de Mont, in 1894, describing his painting The Temptation of St Anthony. He also penned a poem titled On women, which compares its titular subject to a "Mirey pool, crawling with bad beasts" and "Horrible cess-pit, teeming with leeches". We don't know how much these reflect his true views of women, although we do know that he never married or left his family home.
“Our minuscule pug... is very smart and quite sensitive. I’ve played Wagner for him; he let out heartrending cries and bit Mitche nastily. He entertains us greatly.”
Mitche was Ensor's sister, with whom he lived for the majority of his life. This scene was described in an undated letter to Mariette Rousseau, a close friend with whom he maintained a 25-year correspondence totalling over 350 letters.
“I don't have children, but light is my daughter.”
As a painter, Ensor was preoccupied with light throughout his lifetime, becoming particularly impassioned when discussing the subject in this excerpt from a speech made in the 1930s.
On his work...
“I’ve added a few hundred more figures: ghastly devils, horrible animals, revolting and obscene monsters. I am very pleased.”
Writing to his friend Pol de Mont in 1895, Ensor vented his frustration at the lack of artistic appreciation among his fellow Ostenders. Ensor had mixed feelings about his hometown; his English father, an alcoholic, was attacked by local thugs in 1885 while on his way home, prompting a serious breakdown in his mental health. Reporting the attack in a letter to Mariette, Ensor wrote that the attackers' families had just passed the house laughing, bitterly commenting "that's the Ostend public for you". However, Ensor never left his birthplace, choosing to stay put even through two world wars.
“I feel more English than most of the English artists now slavishly imitating the early Italians.”
Writing to a critic in his later years, Ensor compared himself to British artists and satirists including Turner, Hogarth and Gainsborough, while disparaging the in-vogue Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Like Hogarth, Ensor's work makes extensive use of caricature, most notably in Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889, which placed several recognisable Belgian notables amongst the crowds of people.
“...our desires are born of the flatlands, our paradises are made of dough and condensed milk, and our endearments are made of butter.”
“I was born on Friday, April 13, 1860, the day of Venus. At my birth Venus came toward me, smiling, and we looked into each other's eyes. She smelled pleasantly of sea water.”
An imaginative retelling of Ensor's birth, as told in My writings.
“What a wonderful, phosphorescent dream: to end in beauty, tenderly embraced by a passionate octopus!”
Ensor's writings frequently make reference to the sea; unsurprisingly, given that he lived in a coastal town all his life. Here, he envisions dying in the depths of the North Sea, evoking some unusual imagery in the process.
Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans is in The Sackler Wing of Galleries at the RA until 29 January 2017.
"I'm a creampuff gone rotten" – James Ensor on art and life. By Sandra Mackenzie. Royal Academy of Arts, November 25, 2016
1. Drawing room as studio
James Ensor was a painter who often focused on one subject and one way of painting for an extended period, before moving on entirely. He was still a very young artist in 1880 when he started work on what his close friend Eugène Demolder called ‘une série de femmes coquettes’. Nowadays we refer to these works as his ‘bourgeois drawing rooms’.
Ensor captured different corners of the interior in his sketchbook or on his easel, dissecting and rearranging them. Our impression of the room recalls an interior design magazine. What was traditionally a hyper-female space became Ensor’s temporary studio, in which his sister Mitche, his mother Maria Cathérine and his aunt Mimi perform everyday rituals. Representing these actions on such a large scale heightens their significance, while the dark colours create an intimate mood. We get a fly-on-the-wall view of the everyday life of the women in the family. Yet there is a marked contrast with reality: although the drawing-room scenes suggest that the ladies live a placid life, they were in fact extremely active as ‘modern’ women in the family business.
And then along came The Oyster Eater in 1882 – bright, colourful and less staged. Ensor brought his easel closer to his subject and rather than the muted colours, it is now the action itself that creates the sense of intimacy. A young woman peaceably enjoys her meal, oblivious to the ‘lens’ zooming in on her. It was the first major turning point in Ensor’s career and one that brought him a step closer to the colours of his more mature years.
2. Portrait of Ensor’s sister
The Oyster Eater is Mariëtte Caroline Emma, or Mitche, as Ensor knew his sister. She was born on 28 August 1861, making her a year younger than the artist. Like her brother, Mitche Ensor liked to push at the boundaries and she enjoyed a tempestuous love life in her twenties. In 1892 she married Alfred John Taen-Hee-Tsen, an importer of Chinese and Japanese goods, some of which were sold in the Ensor family shop. The couple separated in 1893, however, following the birth of their daughter Mariette Alexandrine Jeanne. Little Alex was a ray of sunshine in the family home and also won her Uncle James’ heart.
Her life might have been turbulent, but this didn’t mean Mitche couldn’t sit still: she posed regularly for her brother. We spot her, for instance, in Ensor’s Lady with a Red Parasol. She was fond of the arts, not to mention the progressive artists like Willy Finch who came to the house to visit their friend James. Do we get to see a bit more of the ‘real Mitche’ in her oyster-eating alter ego?
3. Not a portrait but a still life
The Oyster Eater is much more than simply a portrait of his sister, it is a form of self-expression. Artists in the 19th century began to ask themselves what a painting ought to be. They gradually distanced themselves from the idea that art had a duty to hold up a mirror to the public. It wasn’t their job, they argued, to dictate what was good, right or beautiful: the viewer should be allowed simply to enjoy their talent. They threw out all sorts of rules on perspective and lighting and began to experiment and to develop styles of their own, through which they could develop freely.
For someone like Ensor who refused to be bound by rules, this suited him down to the ground. He was a conductor, spreading out his paint thickly and thinly with palette knife and brush, to create accents through his impastoed touches. His oyster eater is seated in the middle of a vibrant composition of colours that intensify or contrast with one another. Variation is the watchword here, in both execution and chromatic tones. Although the work as a whole evokes a sense of calm, Ensor broke new ground with The Oyster Eater for both himself and Belgian art. What he created was more a gigantic still life, in fact, than a portrait.
4. In the Land of Colours
James Ensor’s initial title for The Oyster Eater was the rather abstract In the Land of Colours. Colour does indeed play the leading role in his composition. All the same, the artist did not abandon his classical training entirely: he continued to work with preparatory layers, for instance, where the Impressionists had begun to paint directly onto the white canvas. The pigments he used were fairly traditional as well: vermilion, lead white, ochre, cobalt blue, Prussian blue and synthetic ultramarine. The chrome yellow in The Oyster Eater is the exception – far more intense than the pale Naples yellow he had used previously. So what makes this work so different to his earlier bourgeois interiors? Firstly, the colours are lighter in tone. In many cases, Ensor used them pure, rather than mixing them. And he also laid them down in large expanses or applied them in a sketchy manner.
Ensor might not have painted directly onto the support, but he did create a white canvas of his own: the tablecloth fills the painting, together with the napkins and Mitche’s shawl. It is this expanse of white that ultimately lends the colours their brightness and power. The effect is heightened by the intriguing pattern of reflections.
Ensor opted firmly for yellows and reds so that we almost feel the warm, abundant sunlight flooding into the room. No wonder Mitche looks so content.
For all the speculation about oysters as an aphrodisiac, the artist did not intend to create a scene with any erotic overtones. In 1882, oysters were cultivated on a large scale in Ostend for export and were simply easy to come by. Ensor later said he wished he’d painted Mitche tucking into mussels instead.
5. Not an instant hit
After seeing The Oyster Eater, Emile Verhaeren declared that Ensor was ‘the first of all our artists to paint in a truly bright way’. The Flemish author was deeply impressed and was keen to hold Ensor up as the great innovator of Belgian art. But not everyone saw it that way. The critics didn’t hold back: the colours were too strident and the work was sloppily painted. What’s more, it was unseemly to paint such a second-rate subject on such an immense scale – 2 x 1.3 m. And the loosely applied perspective made it seem like everything could come tumbling out of the painting at any moment.
"The first of all our artists to paint in a truly bright way. " Emile Verhaeren
The Antwerp Salon, at which the leading art of the day was exhibited, rejected the work in 1882, and even Ensor’s old comrades at L’Essor in Brussels refused to show The Oyster Eater the following year. Only in 1886 was Ensor able to present his milestone in public for the first time at the Brussels avant-garde art society Les Vingt. But even then, he had to keep fighting his painting’s corner. As late as 1907, Liège City Council decided not to acquire the work for the local Musée des Beaux Arts.
Fortunately, Ensor’s good friend Emma Lambotte stepped in. She bought the painting and hung it in her own drawing room, completing the circle. For a while, anyway: about 20 years later the KMSKA was given the opportunity to buy the work and the museum wasted no time in saying yes.
6. Freshly restored
Over the years, The Oyster Eater’s famous colours gradually deteriorated and paint began to lift and crack. The biggest problem, however, was the painting’s thick layer of varnish. Until recently, that is, when conservator Lene Smedts successfully removed it.
This was certainly necessary, as the varnish layer was thick, yellowed, irregular and glossy. The resulting yellow sheen virtually cancelled out the nuances in the white zones and the fresh look of the overall work that Ensor had intended. All the subtlety of his colours had also been lost, while the glossy coating created unsightly reflections. The vibrant surface structure that is such a part of this painting could no longer be seen either.
Thanks to the conservator’s skills, we will soon be able to admire Ensor’s work once more, just as he meant it to look.
Six Things You Should Know About Ensor’s Oyster Eater. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, 2024.
She published poems, books and art criticism, but it wasn’t enough. When she saw Ensor’s work in a magazine, she immediately recognized a soul mate. A friendship was born, letters exchanged and Emma went on to buy 20 works by Ensor. In doing so, she both supported the artist and raised her own profile. How exactly? We asked Ulrike Müller, who knows all there is to know about the world of art collectors in the 19th and early 20th century.
Who was Emma Lambotte?
Ulrike Müller: ‘Emma was born in Liège in 1876. Her father was the printer and businessman Edouard Protin, so she grew up in a well-to-do bourgeois family. Education was important to the Protins and Emma went to the best private schools, which certainly wasn’t always the case for girls back then. Because of her artistic talents, she was also allowed to take private lessons at the academy in Liège. At the age of 19, Emma married a doctor called Albin Lambotte. The couple moved to Antwerp, where Albin was appointed chief surgeon at the Stuyvenberg Hospital. They lived in a grand house on Louizastraat, near the recently constructed National Bank.’
Did she like Antwerp?
Ulrike Müller: ‘Emma found herself in the conservative medical world in Antwerp. There’s a letter to James Ensor where she describes the guests at a dinner party at her home as “a group of old grey men and their equally grey wives”. She wished Ensor had been there, so she’d have had a like-minded person to talk to. His self-portrait was hung in a prominent place in her dining room, which at least meant she could look at the artist during the dinner and feel connected to him that way. She certainly felt more at home with artists than in high society.’
How did Emma spend her time?
Ulrike Müller: ‘She wrote. We mainly know her nowadays as a writer of poetry, books and art criticism, albeit under a pseudonym. And she was an art collector too, who identified completely with her collection. The work she chose was often out of step with bourgeois Antwerp taste – a lot of it was contemporary. We haven’t identified an inventory of her collection, so we know all this from photographs and from Emma’s letters.’
True friendship
Ulrike Müller: ‘In 1904. Ensor gave her the true friendship she lacked in her Antwerp circles. She thanks him in one of her letters for treating her more like a pal. Ensor made Emma feel less conscious of her lower social status as a woman.’
What kind of relationship did she have with Ensor?
Ulrike Müller: ‘Emma was bowled over by Ensor’s work. His unconventional style stimulated her taste and her innovative views on art. Supporting Ensor as both a collector and critic also allowed Emma to showcase her own artistic ideals.
‘And Ensor benefited from their friendship too. The fact that Emma bought work from him validated his talent, while the enthusiastic reviews she wrote for the magazines and newspapers helped establish Ensor’s reputation.’
Which works does Emma buy from Ensor?
Ulrike Müller: "Yet mainly the more controversial works, such as The Oyster Eater. For her, these are the works that most typify Ensor, and the best way to affirm him in his individuality. Moreover, they are a way of distancing herself from the Antwerp bourgeoisie."
"She does seek out the edges. She can afford to, because her family has remained in Liege. She cannot embarrass anyone with her peculiar tastes. Possibly she does get support from her husband."
Where did Emma hang the paintings she bought from Ensor?
Ulrike Müller: ‘Emma hung her Ensors in strategic spots in her home. Like many other women of her class, she held salons, to which she invited writers, musicians and artists. These women paid huge attention to interior design, which was viewed as a typically female occupation at the time. On the other hand, the salons and society dinners that took place in those interiors made them semi-public spaces too. Like many other collectors, Emma used her home to express her individual identity to her peers. The Lambottes had furniture and wallpaper in the latest Art nouveau style, for instance.’
Ensor's works are essential in Emma's interiors. In her monumental hall, she hangs Still Life with Chinoiseries. A statement, because visitors get to see it immediately when they enter the house.Close by, she creates her own still lifes with Asian prints, plates, feathers, vases and figurines. But she goes one step further.In the same hall, she hangs Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise.This is a shocking work, which by no means everyone can appreciate.She writes to Ensor about the overwhelming effect the painting has on the entire hall."
Did Emma buy artworks from Ensor herself or did the Lambottes purchase them together?
Ulrike Müller: ‘There are letters showing that Emma picked out the works at Ensor’s place. The artist only wrote to her, but he did describe the couple as friends of his. Albin is known to have been an art lover too, but he was a busy surgeon and so probably had less time to invest in the collection. Ensor showed his gratitude for Emma’s support by giving her his Self-Portrait with Masks.’
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Mutual influence
Did Emma have any impact on Ensor’s career?
Ulrike Müller: ‘Emma bought 20 paintings from Ensor all told, which meant she had the largest collection of his work at the time. And as I already mentioned, she wrote about his art as well. Most importantly, it was Emma who introduced Ensor to the Antwerp collector and patron François Franck. He was the driving force behind the progressive art society ‘Kunst van het Heden’ [‘Art of the Present’]. He brought Ensor into the exhibition circuit, which boosted his reputation and prestige. It’s how Ensor came to show his work in Rotterdam in 1910.’
‘A growing number of collectors and museums, including the KMSKA, began to buy his work at that point and Kunst van het Heden even organized an Ensor retrospective in Antwerp in 1921. Emma was the only woman on the exhibition committee and she loaned 14 works from her own collection for the occasion. She made a real mark on the exhibition, precisely because the paintings she owned were less obvious ones.’
Did Ensor influence Emma’s own artistic career in any way?
Ulrike Müller:
‘Emma painted when she was young, but that’s not where her ambitions lay. All we know of her work is a painting of an interior with her desk and Ensor’s Self-Portrait with Masks hanging above it. It highlights the inspiration Emma drew from the artist’s work.'
‘She channelled her passion much more into writing. Being an author enabled her to express her opinions. She wanted to be innovative, to emancipate herself, to have a voice as a woman. She could do so more effectively as a patron and writer than as a painter. And she was very effective in her chosen role.'
‘Emma continued to associate herself with Ensor throughout her life. She lectured on his art and also wrote her memoirs through the prism of their friendship. At the age of 85, just before her death, she was still working on a book titled Ensor, que I’ai connu [‘Ensor as I knew him’].’
'In 1927, Emma and Albin sold the KMSKA six works by Ensor, including The Oyster Eater and Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise. It is not clear why they were willing to part with the paintings – perhaps their new home in Wilrijk was too small or the market was particularly good at that moment.'
Ulrike Müller is a researcher at the Mayer van den Bergh Museum and a post-doctoral researcher at Antwerp University (Centre for Urban History).
Emma Lambotte, Ensor’s Soul Mate. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, 2024.
Who on earth is James Ensor? If you’re British, chances are you’ve never heard of him. If you’re Belgian (or Dutch or German), though, you probably know all about him. In Flanders, where I’m writing this in a windswept café on the Ostend seafront, he’s regarded as a figure of national importance — a name to set alongside Rubens and Van Dyck in the rich history of Flemish art.
There are
plenty of Flemish artists who mean absolutely nothing to British audiences, and
in most cases that’s no great loss. If there’s one foreign painter who does
deserve more attention in Britain, it’s James Ensor. For one thing, he’s
actually half English (his father, though born in Brussels, was a British
citizen, the son of two English emigres). He was also a truly revolutionary
artist, a pioneer of modern art. The most important reason, though, is that his
unique artworks are terrific fun.
Go to any
Belgian art gallery, and it’s hard to avoid Ensor. There are excellent
collections of his paintings in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels and
KMSKA in Antwerp, but the best place to see his work is here in Ostend, where
he spent his entire life. Throughout 2024, Ostend is staging numerous events
and exhibitions. Although the excuse for this Ensor year is actually pretty
spurious — the 75th anniversary of his death — it’s a great opportunity for
Brits to discover an artist whom they can call their own, in a seaside resort
not far from home.
When Ensor
was born in Ostend in 1860, his hometown was a sleepy place, barely more than a
fishing village, but when sea bathing became chic, it quickly became a
boomtown. Leopold II, King of the Belgians, came here on his holidays, and le
tout Belgique followed in his wake. Ensor’s English father had failed at
several careers (medic, engineer, businessman), but his Belgian mother was made
of tougher stuff. She ran a souvenir shop, which generated enough money to
raise her two children — James and his sister Mariette — and allow her amiable
husband to become a barely functioning alcoholic.
James
wasn’t remotely academic, but he had a natural flair for drawing, and
thankfully his canny mother found sufficient funds to send him to the art
academy in Brussels. He excelled at art school and made some influential
contacts. Rather than staying on in the Belgian capital after graduating, he
returned to Ostend, and moved back in with his parents. An attic room above the
shop became his studio, where he toiled away for the next 30 years.
Painting in
this provincial garrett, he might easily have been forgotten, but the Brussels
cognoscenti beat a path to his attic door. Curators and collectors loved him.
It’s easy to see why. His realistic early paintings are powerful and
atmospheric. If he’d continued in the same vein, painting impressionistic
seascapes, his work would still command considerable attention. Instead, in the
late 1880s in his late twenties, he switched to a more expressionistic style,
cementing his place as a key player in the evolution of modern art.
Today,
Ensor’s expressionistic paintings can seem like just another stage in the
development of modernism, closely aligned with German expressionists like Max
Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Otto Dix. It’s easy to forget that Ensor
was a generation older than these German artists; his journey into
expressionism predated theirs by 20 years.
Seeing the
masks and skulls and strange creatures in Ensor’s paintings, I’d always assumed
he must have a vivid imagination. When you come to Ostend, you realise he
simply painted what he saw. His mother’s souvenir shop sold all sorts of
grotesque curios, and Ostend’s annual carnival enabled its respectable citizens
to commit all sorts of indiscretions in disguise.
Compared to his fantastical carnival scenes, the new Ensor show at Mu.Zee, Ostend’s municipal art gallery, is relatively tame. It’s a display of still lifes — a genre which accounted for about a quarter of his output — but although these pictures of food and drink are no substitute for pictures of manic revellers making mayhem, they show how Ensor could enliven even the dullest scene. The exhibition includes other still lifes painted around the same time by other artists, and the difference is astounding. Their dreary workaday daubs look lifeless and pedestrian by comparison.
A short
walk away from Mu.Zee is the Ensorhuis, where the family souvenir shop and the
apartment above have been carefully preserved as a museum. You realise what a
humdrum life he led — a petit bourgeois Belgian in an obscure backwater, with
extraordinary creative gifts. It goes to show that you can still harbour big
ideas in a small town.
Ensor lived
until the grand old age of 89 — a remarkable lifespan, straddling an era of
tremendous change. He never married. He had no children. His private life
remains a riddle. He was certainly eccentric, but he also had a wicked sense of
humour. Anecdotes about his idiosyncrasies abound, but I suspect they may have
been practical jokes, played at everyone else’s expense.
Ensor was
ennobled in 1929, an honour which he embraced with a refreshing absence of
false modesty. “Baron James Ensor” reads the headstone on his grave, in a small
churchyard on the edge of town. Heroically, Ensor saved this church, the Maria
Kerke, and the surrounding dunes, from developers.
The rest of
Ostend wasn’t so lucky. In 1900, Baedeker called it “one of the most
fashionable and cosmopolitan watering places in Europe”, but even in Ensor’s
lifetime it underwent a steep decline. Occupied by the Germans in both world
wars, it was bombed by both sides, but many of the worst architectural
atrocities were committed by the Belgians. For every Belle Époque building destroyed
by war, several were demolished by postwar speculators, who made a quick buck
replacing ornate villas with bland apartment blocks.
Like a lot
of British seaside towns, Ostend’s tourist trade was undercut by cheap flights
to Spain, and the Eurostar scuppered its cross-channel traffic. It shares the
same fitful climate as southern England, and if the weather’s foul (which it
often is) it can feel pretty bleak. However, when the sun shines it’s a lively
place, with some delightful Art Deco relics hidden amidst the modern high-rise:
most notably the Hotel du Parc, a nice place to stay, with a stylish brasserie.
There are some superb places to eat — try Belle de Jour, which doubles as a
cosy B&B.
Yet it’s
James Ensor which makes Ostend special, and the more time you spend here, the
more his ghost seems to come alive. There are too many tales to recount, but
one story stands out for me. In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, two
brilliant young German artists, Franz Marc and August Macke, made a pilgrimage
to Ostend to visit Ensor, an artist they’d always admired. They knew war was
near, and Ensor was in his fifties. They figured this might be their last
chance to meet him. They were right, but not in the way that they’d imagined.
Marc and Macke both perished on the Western Front, fighting for the Kaiser’s
army. Ensor, on the other hand, lived on until 1949.
The
imagination of Ensor : The great Belgian painter could enliven the most mundane
scenes. By William Cook. The Critic, December 31, 2023.
Depending on how you look at things, contemporary satire is experiencing either a golden age or a period of impotence. Never in recent memory have public figures acted like such buffoons. But comedians have the unenviable task of making fun of people who are already caricatures of themselves. How to parody someone whose persona already amounts to a malicious burlesque?
It was in
this general mood of resignation and despair that I visited the recent James
Ensor exhibition at Gladstone Gallery’s uptown space in New York, and to my
pleasant surprise I left with a slightly renewed sense of hope for the power of
humor in art.
A
contemporary of the Neo-Impressionists and Symbolists who belonged to neither
group, Ensor reached his artistic maturity in 1880s Belgium and was, along with
Daumier, one of the first European artists since Goya to respond to the crises
of modernity with laughter, in the deepest sense of the word. Known primarily
for his gargantuan masterpiece L’entrée du Christ à Bruxelles (Christ’s Entry
into Brussels in 1889), 1888, where the painter’s full arsenal is on
display—masked figures, acid colors, a jarring clash of fantasy and reality,
the depiction of the urban crowd—Ensor only exhibited this summa of his work in
1929, when he was sixty-eight. One of the benefits of the Gladstone show, besides
providing an intimate setting in Edmund Durell Stone’s old apartment (whose
elongated yet elegant proportions resemble those of a Belgian town house), was
to showcase what Ensor was known for in his own lifetime, a wildly inventive
and diverse body of work in smaller-scale drawing, etching, and painting.
What struck
me immediately was an acerbic visual wit that spared no one, not even fellow
artists, family, or friends. A small etching, peste dessous, peste dessus,
peste partout (Plague Above, Plague Below, Plague All Around), 1904, based on a
photograph of Ensor’s friends, is a case in point. The original image depicts a
congenial gathering, but the print imagines an unconcerned public expelling
clouds of virus into the air with little regard for the nearby (masked!)
barefoot woman carrying a child who has seemingly succumbed to the plague. The
blatant disregard for public health by those with means—and the inordinate
burden shouldered by those without them—could not have been made clearer. Many
of Ensor’s mockeries of late-nineteenth-century Belgian society are equally
pertinent today, almost three-quarters of a century after his death in 1949.
His grotesque portraits of judges, gendarmes, and doctors could be easily
replaced with the faces of today’s Supreme Court justices, policemen, and
anti-vax “experts” without losing any of their biting force.
The comic in
Ensor extends well beyond timely social critique. Theorists of laughter from
Baudelaire to Bakhtin have argued against reducing humor to contemporary
satire. For one, jokes about current events can become meaningless once the
events in question are no longer current (although they can feel relevant again
when circumstances, such as a pandemic or a broken judiciary, return). But more
important, topical humor implies the superiority of the lampooner over the
lampooned. To use Baudelaire’s example, we may laugh at someone who trips and
falls, but only because we ourselves retain our footing. For post-Romantic
thinkers, such aloofness was symptomatic of the introverted and detached irony
of the modern city dweller.
For sure,
there is political commentary aplenty in Ensor, but interwoven into his oeuvre
is another kind of comedy, a tradition of folk humor dating back to the Middle
Ages. Historically, the carnivalesque, according to Bakhtin, engendered a less
divisive, more collective form of laughter. In the medieval counterculture of
the carnival, people still laughed at others. But they also laughed with them,
because everyone laughed at and with themselves. And that was OK. Laughter was
universal and endemic to a culture in which, for a short period before Lent,
the world was turned upside down and inside out: Devils became kings, beggars
became priests, the everyday became the ceremonial, the poor became the rich,
ridicule became praise, and sorrow became joy. In fact, such overturning of
norms was necessary for the survival of culture because it opened possibilities
usually denied to the populace by official rules and regulations.
The
preponderance of skeletons and pantomime characters in Ensor’s work is evidence
of this carnival spirit. So, too, is the grotesque element. Among the things
that drew Bakhtin to the French writer Rabelais were the abundant references in
the latter’s writing to exaggerated and deformed bodies, with a frequent focus
on the digestive and excretory functions, locomotion, and
materiality—everything below the belt, as it were. Ensor’s persistently
corporal distortions and scatological imagery are not limited to evildoers.
They apply to everyone, because for him they constitute a utopian condition in
which identity is constantly in flux and resistant to the forces of repression.
Corrupt officials may have gruesome faces, but so do Ensor and his patron
friends in an almost touching triple portrait from the exhibition in which the
artist appears in drag, M et Mme Rousseau parlant avec Sophie Yoteko (Mr. and
Mrs. Rousseau Speaking with Sophie Yoteko), 1892.
In Ensor, the
primary mode of the carnivalesque is the mask, which combines bodily
exaggeration with the tropes of becoming and ambivalence. Like the grotesque
body, the mask is not static and instead is composed of morphing protuberances
and nooks. A mask can be an alternate identity and, in diametric opposition, an
avatar of the “real” person behind it, their “true” self. The emotions the mask
evokes are equally dual-natured. A fake face can be both an object of ridicule
and a source of joy.
Yet what
ultimately gives Ensor’s art its vitality is the convergence, if not the clash,
of the two different models of public life on view within it, the medieval
carnival and the modern crowd. In Ensor’s time, the representation of the urban
multitude was a relatively new phenomenon and took the form of a scene of the
official parade, of bourgeois leisure, or of class revolt. In all three cases,
the individual was effaced: subordinated to the state, lost in the crowd,
consumed by the mob. Ensor learned important lessons from Breughel, Rembrandt,
and Goya about how to pictorially organize such groupings. But he also took
from those artists a sense of the individuality-within-collectivity of the
marketplace festival and made it proliferate within the anonymous modern mass.
At the festive end would be his drawing of tourists bathing at coastal Ostend
(where Ensor lived for most of his life, working at one point in a studio above
his family’s shop, which sold masks for carnival). In a scene straight out of
Where’s Waldo?, tiny figures cavort across the page, some of them bumping bums
while others fart into the sea. In contrast, at his most explicitly political,
Ensor depicted police in the same town intervening in a dispute (eerily
reminiscent of one of Brexit’s major debates) over fishing rights between
Belgian and English boatmen.
I don’t think
Ensor was so naive as to actually believe in the comeback of carnival in its
traditional form. But neither did he take comfort in either the contemporaneous
mysticism of Gauguin or the unrelenting scientism of Seurat, both of whom
exhibited with Les XX, the artists’ group Ensor helped found. The heterogeneity
of folk humor, its serious playfulness, lived on in his art, not simply in his
satires of the world around him but in his nonconformist attitude, as one would
expect of an anarchist. Thus, most refreshingly, his work mocks those for whom
one would have expected him to have the most sympathy. The artists of Les XX
were taken to task for being too easily enthralled by pointillism. Though
Ensor’s salacious print Alimentation doctrinaire (Doctrinal Nourishment),
1889–95, depicts the leaders of the state, the church, and the military
defecating into a street teeming with people, the artist does not identify
wholeheartedly with the victimized crowd. On the contrary, the masses eagerly
consume the bullshit being fed to them by those in power. Even today, Ensor has
the last laugh.
Paul Galvez
is a research associate at the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the
University of Texas at Dallas. His book Courbet’s Landscapes: The Origins of
Modern Painting (Yale University Press) is forthcoming this spring.
Funny Games :
Paul Galvez on James Ensor. By Paul Galvez. Artforum, vol. 60, nr.7, March 2022.
The Ensor
exhibition at the Royal Academy (until 29 January) is for me the event of the
autumn. It is twenty years since Ensor had a show in London, and another sixty
years before that since the Leicester Galleries’ retrospective of 1936 (the artist
was still alive, but the handful of years round 1890 when most of his best work
had been done must already have seemed remote). Luc Tuymans has chosen
wonderfully for the present survey – thirty paintings, fifty merciless drawings
and prints – and Antwerp and other Belgian collections have lent with touching
generosity. I hope the Belgians will forgive me if I say that looking at Ensor
in the Academy struck home as hard as it did partly because the paintings
seemed to me to connect so deeply, and so variously, with the line of French
art from Delacroix to Cézanne. This is the art from which Ensor drew his
strength. I know he was fond of saying in his later years that ‘J’entends
ignorer mes influences,’ and ‘Paris m’est totalement inconnue,’ but he did not
expect anyone to believe him. His imagery was rooted in the traditions of the
Low Countries, with Brueghel and Bosch constant companions; but as a painter –
as a colourist, as a manipulator of impasto – Ensor spent his life dreaming of
Delacroix and Monticelli and Moreau, and what the Impressionists had done,
especially the high-speed Manet of the 1870s. I’m sure he must at some point
have seen early Cézannes – The Orgy, perhaps, or Achille Emperaire, or a
Temptation of St Anthony – and thought about repeating them in the key of late
Turner. But Delacroix was always the presiding genius. The Fall of the Rebel
Angels in the show is a wild précis of Delacroix’s Apollo ceiling (with
Brueghel in the background). Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise draws from the
same source. The great anarchist Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 – too
big and fragile to travel to London, but represented by an unrepentant etching
Ensor did of it six years later (only the blood-red banner reading ‘Vive la
Sociale’ has been suppressed) – recasts Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People
as an endless crowd of carnival Crusaders Entering Constantinople.
Perhaps it
is true that an artist’s influences should not interest us much (Ensor’s wish
to drop the subject has my sympathy) unless what they give rise to in the work
before us is baffling, yet immediately coherent in its own right, and also an
achievement that, once seen, appears to upend our view of the tradition being
drawn on, putting that tradition in a new light. This is the Ensor effect. Who,
without The Intrigue or Skeletons Fighting for the Body of a Hanged Man, would
truly have grasped how much it mattered to French painting all through the 19th
century – and still in the age of Picasso and de Chirico – that the ordinary, daily,
material life of modernity be seen to be haunted by the unreal, the deathly,
the disguised, the predatory, the phantasmagoric? The famous tagline Walter
Benjamin borrowed from Leopardi – ‘Fashion: Madame Death! Madame Death!’ –
seems made for the world Ensor shows.
Look again at The Intrigue and Skeletons Fighting. What seems to me stupendous about them (and thoroughly Boschian) is their ability to convince us that horror and absurdity are familiar events, behaviours we all recognise from our daily round. The colour and touch Ensor brings on to support that intuition do both hover, yes, on the edge of the showy. But in the years round 1890 that edge was where a renewed modern realism seemed possible. Garishness and matter-of-factness were faces of the same coin – never more painfully than in pictures like these. Which of the two concepts just tried on for size – garishness and everydayness – applies, for instance, to the charity-shop outfit of the figure on the left in Skeletons Fighting? Or the mouldy yellow fur of the man in The Intrigue? (His mask-face as frightened and disconsolate as a face in painting has ever been.) Or the ward-doctor whites belonging to the hanged man? (The ‘CIVET’ pinned to the corpse’s chest is presumably the kind Lear asked the apothecary for, ‘to sweeten my imagination’. The line of dried blood leading from tongue to placard is happily unreproducible.)
I concede
that once I start describing a good Ensor I can’t stop piling on gory detail.
But this is not what happens in front of the real thing: the pictures are not
chambers of horrors. Their detail may regularly be disgusting or tawdry or
delectable (almost in the way of Baudelaire’s ‘Une charogne’), but by and large
it is firmly contained, almost neutralised, by the whole painted rectangle,
that is, by the ordinariness of the masqueraders’ surroundings, and the sober
underlying view of bourgeois society being proposed. What makes Skeletons
Fighting so chilling, to put it another way, is the grim seedy decency of the
picture’s colour: the force of its ice-cold blues, greens and whites, one of
the blues entombing a skull staring up at us reproachfully from ground level;
and above all the schoolroom joylessness of the picture’s floorboards and back
wall. No theatre of cruelty has ever been provided with a less glamorous stage.
Ensor’s whole sense of space in these 1890s pictures is unerring. The nastiness
and pathos of his bourgeois undead – there is a picture (not in the show,
though again a later etching is there as reminder) where the skeletons huddle
for warmth round a woodstove, one of them clutching a painter’s maulstick and
palette, another with a violin – would be infinitely more dismissible, put down
as mere whimsy, if Ensor had not, in ways just described, so completely
realised the bare rooms and bric-à-brac and dismal ‘hangings’ in which his
maskers seek their thrills. In the third of the great 1890s paintings lent by
Antwerp to the show, L’Etonnement du masque Wouse, the room is enlivened by an
evanescent green and pink Oriental landscape, with birds of paradise and mystic
lilies, the kind Ensor’s art-world particularly treasured. ‘Etonnement’ here –
the title is Ensor’s, given when he first showed the painting in Brussels – is
difficult to translate. The masqueraders are certainly not astonished by their
own or anyone else’s behaviour – that’s part of Ensor’s point – just
disoriented, maybe interested for a moment, then bored, resentful, smug,
sneering, nihilistic. A critic in La Jeune Belgique in 1890 struck the right
note: Ensor’s colours, he wrote, reach back essentially to Goya’s, and so does
his view of life. ‘Il fait
penser à cette lignée terrible et maudite: Maldoror, Rimbaud.’ He has given us a new set of Black
Paintings reimagined by a cackling van Gogh.
And yet there is tenderness in Ensor – an unmistakable fellow feeling for his marionettes. He would be an immensely lesser artist (as would Goya and Rimbaud) if there were not. The Intrigue is drenched in pity – almost to its detriment, but not quite. Those who care about Ensor as an artist have always been fascinated by the length of time he lived on after his six or seven years of inspiration – he died in 1949. He became, I would say entirely knowingly and deliberately, a ghost or simulacrum of himself, more and more accepting the role of dead ornament to a regime his art had once savaged. Baron Ensor, eventually. But hadn’t his art always predicted such a future? Wasn’t one form or another of undeadness what Ensor believed – felt – bourgeois society had in store for all of us? Isn’t the intimacy of these paintings with desperation and aimlessness – with false vitality – what gives them enduring power?
Ensor is
one of the strangest artists to have emerged from a socialist and anarchist
milieu – stranger even than Platonov or Pasolini. That socialism of some sort
was the context that mattered in his case is clear. The first serious piece of
writing about him appeared in 1891 in the socialist journal La Société
nouvelle, published in Paris and Brussels: it was written by a novelist friend,
Eugène Demolder. When Demolder followed up with a short book a few months later
it was titled James Ensor, la mort mystique d’un théologien. (The great Verhaeren,
poet of the revolutionary crowd, lent his name to a second monograph in 1908.)
You have to work hard to find Demolder’s 1892 subtitle acknowledged in the
art-historical literature, but it is important, and only half ironical. In
Belgian socialism at fin de siècle, Christ and La Sociale (the anarchists’
codeword for the coming social revolution) were inseparable. Demolder in La
Société nouvelle has Ensor’s Christ ‘step down into the crowd and slap the
ridiculous bishop with his stigmatised hands’. There is a ferocious Man of
Sorrows in the show, painted the same year as Demolder’s essay, whose Christ
seems fully capable of doing the job. He is best looked at in tandem with a
panel hung nearby, also dated 1891, titled Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled
Herring. No doubt the panel’s strip-cartoon pessimism is all-encompassing –
‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do’ – but at the same time it
resonates specifically with Ostend and class struggle. Ostend in the late 19th
century (it was Ensor’s home, and he rarely stirred far from the place) shared
its bathing beaches with a hard-scrabble fishing industry – it was Bognor with
a large dash of Grimsby. In August 1887 fish packers set on three English boats
trying to undersell the locals, and gendarmes shot dead six or more of the
rioters, wounding scores of others (the numbers are disputed) before order
returned. There is a drawing at the Academy called The Strike, but its first
title seems to have been Le Massacre des pêcheurs ostendais. Notice that one of
the skeletons in the Pickled Herring picture is sporting a busby. Ensor did a
painting in 1892 of fishermen’s wives warming themselves over individual
braziers shoved under their skirts, in a room as wintry and miserable as the
room in Skeletons Fighting for the Body of a Hanged Man; naturally, skull
people peer in through a window. One of them carries a heartless placard: ‘A
Mort! – Elles ont mangé trop de poisson.’
The sensibility – the precise strain of anarchistic socialism – that issues from this pattern of sympathies has always been hard to pin down. Demolder’s subtitle speaks to that. Looking again at The Intrigue or L’Etonnement du masque Wouse, I find Ensor’s general attitude to his subject matter – his tone – fundamentally baffling, but also compelling. He is clearly alarmed and amused by bourgeois society, and trying to see – to insist on – masquerade and massacre as its necessary two faces. But how seriously? How compassionately (remembering sweet Jesus, but also his vision of Christ’s entry into Brussels)? With what admixture of class panic?
It happened
that the day I first visited the Academy show I was reading Dostoevsky’s
novella The Eternal Husband, and as I stood in front of The Intrigue I couldn’t
shake off the memory of Velchaninov’s dream:
“”He dreamed of some crime he had committed
and concealed and of which he was accused by people who kept coming up to him.
An immense crowd collected, but more people still came, so that the door was
not shut but remained open. But his whole interest was centred on a strange
person, once an intimate friend of his, who was dead, but now somehow suddenly
had come to see him. What made it most worrying was that Velchaninov did not
know the man, had forgotten his name and could not recall it. All he knew was
that he had once liked him very much. All the other people who had come up
seemed expecting from this man a final word that would decide Velchaninov’s
guilt or innocence, and all were waiting impatiently. But he sat at the table
without moving, was mute and would not speak. The noise did not cease for a
moment, the general irritation grew more intense, and suddenly in a fury
Velchaninov struck the man for refusing to speak, and felt a strange enjoyment
in doing it. His heart thrilled with horror and misery at what he had done, but
there was enjoyment in that thrill. Utterly exasperated, he struck him a second
time and a third, and, drunk with rage and terror, which reached the pitch of
madness, but in which there was an intense enjoyment, he lost count of his
blows, and went on beating the man without stopping. He wanted to demolish it
all, all.”
I think
this gets us into Ensor’s world. Proximity and crowding are two of his themes,
especially in The Intrigue – above all the kind of proximity that confirms each
individual’s deep loneliness. Masks only make the choreography more distinct.
Of course what the ‘it’ ultimately amounts to, for people like Velchaninov,
will never be clear – that is partly Dostoevsky’s point. And Ensor similarly
was a sufferer from rage he couldn’t put a finger on – he was a frozen,
frightened ‘case’ (like Kafka or Maeterlinck). There is always too much guilt
and horror to go round: putting the names ‘sin’ or ‘godlessness’ or ‘bourgeois
society’ to them is bound to be desperate shorthand. But the atmosphere of the
it – that’s what counts in art. That’s what art ought to register. And for a
while Ensor’s did.
There is a tremendous drawing in the exhibition which the catalogue entitles, peculiarly, Revelatory Heart. Something went astray here along the road from American to French back to English. The episode Ensor is illustrating comes from Poe’s story ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’: we are at the moment when the murderer manages to focus a beam of light in the darkness, searching for his victim, an old man asleep; and the beam bounces off the victim’s wide-awake eye. It is a typical Ensor subject: something we’d assumed was inanimate or insensible suddenly looks back at us with malignant life. There are other things based on Poe in the exhibition – notably a sizzling Hop-Frog’s Revenge. But I prefer Ensor’s glum version of the Poe crime story. Again the bleakness of the bedroom is essential. The ghosts and masks have all but vanished in the murk. The Poe of the hellish city whodunits, then, seems relevant to Ensor (not forgetting his Masque of the Red Death); and the Dostoevsky of The Double and The Eternal Husband (with maybe The Grand Inquisitor’s Christ thrown in); and the Redon who lithographed Les Fleurs du mal and Flaubert’s Temptation of St Anthony; and Cézanne swearing to the end of his life that he would do a full-scale Apotheosis of Delacroix. ‘J’entends ignorer mes influences.’ It all adds up, in Ensor’s painting, to a heart-stopping sane brew.
At the
Royal Academy : James Ensor By T.J. Clark. The London Review of Books, Vol. 38 No. 23 · 1 December 2016
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There is a
painting of a skate in this startling exhibition that amounts to nothing less
than a portrait. It shows the voluminous fish sprawled flaccidly on a table.
The ruffed white body spreads like fancy dress around the head, which is
propped up so that the eyes are staring straight at the viewer. The fish wears
a tragicomic expression, slightly humiliated, as if caught drinking too much.
Or perhaps it had only just dined, before becoming dinner itself.
The Skate
is very famous in Ensor’s native Belgium and pretty much the opposite here –
and the same is true of the artist. James Ensor (1860-1949) was born in Ostend,
the son of an English engineer; he had a British passport and spent time in
London. But while we may think of him as the master of the masks – literally:
he appears surrounded by them in one self-portrait – he is regarded as
infinitely more various across the Channel, and so he now appears in this Royal
Academy show.
Here is a
frightening painting of a bathing hut, solitary and remote – number 164 all
alone on the cold grey shore; what happened to the others? Here is Ensor’s
mother on her deathbed in a most delicate and loving portrait, the nose taking
prowess in the sinking face. Here are dark figures receding through the Ostend
fog, and a spectacular painting of Adam and Eve fleeing an avenging angel in
the form of a gigantic firework reaching out of the sky. Eden is low-lying
Flanders.
Christ
hangs on the cross surrounded by a crowd of Ostenders, not all of them duly
solemn. A colossal storm of paint builds above the rooftops and high-tide flags
of this port. Afternoon in Ostend is more like night, an arsenical green glow
to this bourgeois interior in which two women take tea – one looking helplessly
out at the painter, as if in hope of escape from this prison of disaffection
and boredom.
What unites
such disparate images is their peculiarly exuberant energy. Ensor is festive
even when devastating or macabre. His drawing is lithe and precise, unfurling
prolifically in vibrant space; his painting is celebrated for its gorgeous
beauty, the brushmarks radiating across the canvas in lavish density. With the
masks, his palette turns to exhilarating hues of pink, white, ochre, mint green
and bright, seaside blue.
Ostend is
for Ensor what Cookham was for Stanley Spencer: a real place, but also a
microcosmic land of myth and parable. Ensor spent his entire life as a bachelor
living above various shops in this seasonal resort. His mother sold souvenirs,
carnival masks, dolls and chinoiserie; Ensor grew up in her curiosity shop,
delighted by the “opulent colour, reflections and sparkling rays of light… an
inextricable jumble of assorted objects constantly being knocked over by cats,
and deafening parrots”.
Everything
his mother sold he painted, jumbled to a purpose. His Ostend is crowded with
walking dolls, masks and goggling Chinese ceramics, sometimes witnessing a
great moment – the appearance of Christ – sometimes a great farce, as skeletons
wage war over the corpse of a hanged man, or the fish in a grotesque banquet
turn upon the diners, biting their greasy lips. These surrogate people are both
actors and audience in Ensor’s show.
As a
teenager he was taught by a caricaturist and a landscape painter, and his art
often shows it – there are elegiac seascapes, and coruscating satire in his
Seven Deadly Sins. Sloth shows the longest lie-in ever, with devils swinging on
the clock hands above the sluggards and poking at their sleepy eyes while
snails slime up the bedspread. In Gluttony, the next course is a head on a
platter – the artist’s own.
Ensor had
some right to his victim complex. His works were banned from exhibitions, he
was repeatedly excluded from avant-garde groups, and the critics tortured him
in print. Other than his father, who died of drink at 52, his family disliked
his work, and some pictures were partly executed in household paint because he
couldn’t afford oils. In 1893 he even tried to sell his room and its contents;
there were no buyers.
Success –
and there was eventually much of it, culminating in a title – came just around
the time when his ideas were beginning to circle back on themselves in his late
40s.
But it is
too easy to make a satirist of him, savagely guying his compatriots. The whole
Halloween pageant of masks, devils and irate skeletons is not so simple. And
this is what makes the RA’s show exemplary. Curated by Ensor’s fellow Belgian
painter Luc Tuymans, it clears away the repetitions, allows more space for
portraits and landscapes, and gives the sharpest sense of Ensor’s evergreen
originality and his singular vision of the world from above the shop.
The masks
are perverse – an unmasking, you might say. Is anything behind them? A masked
old lady entering a room is astonished by a heap of masks on the floor
(disgraceful untidiness, or a massacre of her fellow beings?). Two masks, one
laughing heartily, the other weeping, are affably hugged by a skeleton wearing
a parrot like a raffish feather hat – how short is the distance from happiness
to grief, via death…
In The
Intrigue, one of Ensor’s largest masterpieces, a throng of masks is seen
sharing some hugger-mugger news with a mother whose baby is a doll. They appear
clamorously energetic. The central figure is a man in an opera hat and evening
dress – if one can call him a man: what he seems, more than anything, is a
figure in a phantasmagoria staged by the artist, a drama of forceful
personalities and riveting inventions; a theatre where the masks can live their
own existence.
Many
scholars (and practically all Belgians, according to the catalogue) have
pondered the mystery of these masks. But Ensor himself was candid. The mask
meant an opportunity for extravagant gesture, expression and decoration, but
above all for “exquisite turbulence”.
Here is a
paradox to carry in mind through this show, where the tone can be so hard to
catch, falling far from obvious psychology. When the masks give way to skulls,
for instance, it might seem as if Ensor was preoccupied by death. But skulls
regularly turned up on the beach at Ostend (130,000 Flemish were massacred
there in the 17th century), and they stand in for children, art critics,
carnival-goers and – regularly – the artist himself. They’re almost anyone
except the dead.
To find
oneself burled up in life’s turbulence – single cells metastasising in
unpredictable throngs – that is Ensor’s modern danse macabre. His predecessors
may be Bosch and Goya, and perhaps Watteau in the eerie loneliness of certain
pictures. But the sustained energy of his pen and brush, the graphic freedom of
his theatrical scenarios is all his own. To be oneself when the onslaught is
going the other way: that is his lifelong principle. In one of his many
self-portraits, Ensor appears surrounded by evil spirits. He looks mildly
perturbed, but not much frightened by this alien crowd. He is nothing like
these figments. As in life, so in art: James Ensor doesn’t fit in.
Intrigue:
James Ensor by Luc Tuymans review – exquisite turbulence. By Laura Cumming. The Guardian, October 30, 2016
Opinionated
yet solitary, James Ensor made use of disguises in life as he did in his
pioneering paintings. A new show at the Royal Academy unmasks Belgium’s master
of darkness
In 1888 the
still-young James Ensor etched a self-portrait “in the year 1960”. Accompanied
by an outsize spider (Ensor hated spiders), the 100-year-old artist’s skeleton
lounges casually on a divan, the skull sprouting remnants of his thick, curly
hair. As so often with this playful master of the macabre, the moods of the
cabaret and mortuary collide. In contrast, his actual resting place looks
rather staid.
Just outside
the pretty medieval church of Our Lady of the Dunes, on the edge of Ostend’s
seaside sprawl, the tomb of Baron James Ensor (the king of Belgium ennobled the
veteran mischief-maker in 1929) keeps itself aloof and apart – as the artist
did during a long life spent in the North Sea fishing port turned holiday
resort. In 2006, however, one of the mammoth spiders sculpted by Louise
Bourgeois and entitled Maman disturbed his peace when it came to squat over his
grave during Ostend’s Beaufort festival of art. Ensor, who had as troubled a
relationship with maternal figures as he did with arachnids, should have
enjoyed the joke.
This month
Ensor will take a starring role in Britain for the first time in two decades
when Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans opens at the Royal Academy. Curated
by Tuymans, Belgium’s subversively deadpan master of figurative painting, the
exhibition gathers 70 paintings, drawings and prints, mostly from Belgian
collections. Ensor had an English father, retained his British nationality
until he scented the prospect of a Belgian title, loved Turner, Gillray and
Hogarth, and once wrote: “I feel more English than most of the English artists
now slavishly imitating the early Italians.” (He detested the pre-Raphaelites,
along with the impressionists, pointillists and almost every other late 19th‑century school.) But his father’s country has not paid enough
attention to the great maverick – at least since, three years before his death,
aged 89, in 1949, the National Gallery displayed a selection of his works.
The RA show
will rectify that neglect, even if the proud, prickly Ensor might have pointed
out that he has to play second fiddle to the abstract expressionist blockbuster
now running at the same address. Tuymans calls this juxtaposition “a beautiful
contradiction”. Ensor, who in 1911 boasted that he had “anticipated all modern
tendencies … in every direction”, would probably claim paternity of Jackson
Pollock, too. Look, for instance, into the delirious vortex of burnt and
scorched colours of his Fall of the Rebel Angels (1889), and you might be
tempted to agree.
You could stuff a student textbook with the “isms” that Ensor arguably pioneered, from surrealism – always at home in Belgium – to symbolism, expressionism, fauvism, even post-modernism. A stylistic nomad, he not only roved among landscape, portraiture, still life, fantasy, satire and caricature, but often whisked them together into a tipsy burlesque of skewed and addled forms. In The Skate (1892), a still life with seafood morphs into a bizarre quasi-erotic reverie, the flatfish splayed like an odalisque as the seashell exposes its crimson gash. Critics always yoke Ensor to the spirit of the carnival – a big deal everywhere in Belgium, and in Ostend in particular. Yet his whirling panoply of masks, costumes and disguises dances on the edge of nightmare more often than it summons up a spell of careless joy.
In The Intrigue (1890), which lends Tuymans’s show its title, a gang of freakishly masked faces converge on a couple – she with a flowered hat, he in a topper – in a livid parody of bonhomie rendered in violent slabs of clashing colours. Death, in a yellow hat, saunters in stage-right. As in Edvard Munch’s near-contemporary vision of ghostly evening strollers on Karl Johan Street in Oslo – and Ensor does regularly bring Munch to mind – these rituals of middle-class sociability have been hatched in hell. It was once thought that the painting depicts Ensor’s beloved sister Mitche and her Chinese husband, who later abandoned her, but the pair met only after its creation. Ensor’s bilious dismay at the bourgeois dance of death needed no external prompts.
A visit to
Ostend, his lifelong home and yet the abode in his eyes of “a hostile public”
that “detests art”, helps to focus the tensions that drove Ensor’s brush. As a
sparkling late-summer day dips towards sunset, the ever-changing flash and
gleam of sea and sky reminds you that Ensor worshipped light as deeply as
Turner did. For him, “light distorts contour”, and its myriad effects in
bending line and shape opened “an enormous realm that I could explore”.
However, a few paces away from this shimmering seafront, the door of the Ensor
House opens on to a scene of gloom and fret. These dark interiors conditioned
his outlook as much as the boundless shores outside. Ensor inherited the narrow
house on Vlaanderenstraat from his aunt and uncle in 1917, and moved out of his
parents’ (now destroyed) home across the street.
His English
father, a well-educated man but known in Ostend as an idler and drinker, had
settled on this coast after he married Marie Catherine Haegheman. Her family
owned curio shops that catered for the town’s crowds of trippers and
vacationers. The carnival masks, seashells, dolls, knick-knacks and oriental
vases that made up the Haeghemans’ stock cram Ensor’s works. This repertoire of
domestic exotica feels more sinister than picturesque. Skulls and skeletons –
often added to finished works as a mocking appendix – also fill the
idiosyncratic prop box of imagery that he rifled throughout his career. As much
as it did for his medieval Flemish and Netherlandish forebears in the age of
Bosch and Brueghel, death leads this carnival parade.
The wastrel
father encouraged young James in his artistic career; the hard-headed mother
and aunt, less so. Ensor never married, although he kept up a decades-long
liaison with a local innkeeper’s daughter, Augusta Boogaerts, and later grew
close to patrons and supporters such as the writer Emma Lambotte. After 1903,
Lambotte helped his trademark works of the 1880s and 90s find buyers and
acclaim. She wrote warmly of her friend as “a skinny Don Quixote sporting the
goatee of a valiant Spaniard … tall, with dark curls, a pale skin, a piercing
glare, moustache in the wind”. His occasional air of raffish misogyny – common
enough among the late-Victorian avant garde – seems to conceal a fearful
solitude. Eccentric, opinionated, the future Baron Ensor at once played to the
gallery and skulked in the wings. In the claustrophobic house on
Vlaanderenstraat, both stage set and hidey-hole, you can sense the lure of the
mask to a cowed rebel imprisoned in a stuffy dressing-up box.
Ostend suited
this gregarious loner. From 1883 to 1893, after his studies in Brussels, he
helped spearhead the group of Belgian progressive artists founded by Octave
Maus and known as The Twenty (Les XX) – but fell out with them, as with other
allies. In Ostend, he first resented but then befriended another local talent:
Léon Spilliaert, whose haunting and introspective night-pieces complement
Ensor’s more garish palette in a wing dedicated to the pair at the town’s fine
museum, Mu.ZEE.
At home, he
could swagger along the front, a frock-coated, acid-tongued lord of misrule,
ready with a quip but quick to take offence. For all his versatility, and his
innovation, Ensor expended too much time and talent on feuds and quarrels. His
Goya-like caricatures often revert to his spats with the critics, as in
Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring. He is the hapless fish, torn between
two long-forgotten arbiters of taste. No one now cares about the parochial row
that fuelled this piece; the image endures in its dream-like weirdness, set
against a rosy Ostend sky.
Tuymans, his
co-curator Adrian Locke reports as we lunch in a cafe-gallery above the sands,
“wanted to look at Ensor with a critical eye. It’s not all about adulation and
admiration.” Brilliantly executed, grotesque and provocative, Ensor’s antic
performances transmit the contradictions of a scurrilous satirist who craved
status and respect. “He was definitely anti-establishment in that he was not
prepared to accept the norms,” says Locke. “On the other hand, he had a family
who were willing to support him.” Here, on the margins of his society and
gazing out across the sea he never crossed (save for a brief visit to London),
the local hero alchemised the art he admired – from Rembrandt and Rubens to
Goya and Turner – into something strange and unique. For Locke, “The enigma of
Ensor is that he looked at other artists, and was influenced by them, but
distils this so that it comes out in a very different way.” In the end, Ensor
neither follows nor sires any “ism”.
Aged 28, the
curmudgeonly renegade painted the vast Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889,
with its swirling, threatening rabble of masked figures around a saviour who
has the features of … James Ensor. Confined to his attic studio, Ensor couldn’t
even unroll the entire 2.5 metre x 4.3 metre canvas until he inherited the
house on Vlaanderenstraat almost 30 years later. Since 1987, it has hung in the
Getty Museum in Los Angeles – which it never leaves. In bulk, Ensor’s
sepulchral dandyism and morbid vaudeville can repel as well as fascinate, for
all its virtuoso dazzle. Then, as in the radiant Adam and Eve Expelled from
Paradise (1887), the North Sea light will blaze through the cynicism. At such
moments, the solitary scoffer transports us from Ostend to eternity.
Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans is at the
Royal Academy, London W1, until 29 January 2017. royalacademy.org.uk.
Behind the facade: how James Ensor mastered the art of the macabre. By Boyd Tonkin. The Guardian, October 28, 2016.
Of the more than 100 paintings, etchings and drawings in the Getty Museum‘s sprawling exhibition devoted to 19th century painter James Ensor, “Skeleton Looking at Chinoiserie” is the sort of work that you just might miss if you cruise through the galleries a little too quickly. It’s small, with muddy colors. In a show filled with bright, reverberating, practically hallucinatory works, it comes off as dim.
“The interior setting kind of evokes traditional genre paintings -- Dutch interiors,” says Getty paintings curator Scott Allan, who organized the show. “But it’s painted in a rough way. It almost looks unresolved or incomplete.”
In fact, Ensor worked on the painting at various points in the mid- to late 1880s.
But the skeleton, who gazes earnestly at what appears to be a sheaf of Japanese prints, marks an important moment for Ensor, an artist who went from painting moody seascapes and portraits to producing almost garish, scathingly satirical works in which bare bottoms rain poop from the sky.
“The painting illustrates a transitional moment for him,” Allan says. “In the late 1880s, he had all of these paintings that he had started painting earlier in the decade, then he revised them.”
When Ensor first painted “Skeleton Looking at Chinoiserie” it contained a human figure.
“There have been technical examinations of this picture,” Allan says. “They were able to determine that there was originally a live figure underneath the skull, at least evidence of a head. Ensor actively skeletized the scene.”
At this moment, he says: “He was turning away from the early naturalist mode and moving into more satirical, moralizing work.”
In the 1880s, Ensor was a well-ensconced member of the Belgian bourgeoisie. His family owned a shop from which he earned a comfortable living. He had achieved some renown as a painter for the ways in which he employed color and light and for the realistic manner in which he portrayed individuals. (Even if at times he was described, critically, as a “mason” for the ways in which he layered on thick layers of paint.)
But at some point in the 1880s, a switch flipped. And Ensor began to make highly politicized -- though always humorous -- works that satirized the government, the Catholic Church, the bourgeoisie, the art establishment and even the art avant-garde.
There were images of the wealthy sitting casually amid poopy pestilence, skeletons descending from the heavens to pursue their human prey, and a legendary over-sized canvas called “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels,” from 1889, that shows a chaotic carnival swallowing the figure of Christ, who seems almost an afterthought amid all the over-the-top pageantry. (This truly epic latter work is in the Getty’s collection and it has pride of place in the show.)
Allan says there is a whole cottage industry devoted to divining what exactly made Ensor shift from painting traditional scenery to creating works that so mischievously and relentlessly attacked the powers that be. As in any artist’s work, it was likely a confluence of things.
In 1887, the artist lost both his father and his grandmother -- significant emotional milestones. But, as Allan points out, the shift didn’t just lie in his personal life. There were a lot of other things going on, too.
Belgium was experiencing a decade of political instability. The secularized left was having it out with the religious right. (Sound familiar?) Belgium was pillaging the Congo. And suffragists were pushing for the right to vote for all men, whether or not they were property owners. In 1880s Belgium, only 10% of men were allowed to vote. You can forget about the women.
The late 19th century brought a lot of upheaval to the art world, too. In France, in the 1860s, artists had banded together to create the Salon des Refuses as a way of protesting the conservatism of the Academy. Artists regularly attacked affectation and hypocrisy. In Belgium, they banded together in an another outsider group called Les XX (“The Twenty”), of which Ensor was a part.
“In the second half of the 1880s, a lot of artists are frustrated with and over naturalism,” Allan says. “They’re trying to push into more subjective and fantastical directions.”
All of this comes on the heels of the work of people such as satirist Honore Daumier, who regularly skewered the powerful in his illustrations, and Francisco de Goya, whose “Caprichos” series took on the gassiness of the powerful. (Like Ensor, Goya loved giving high society the metaphorical finger -- and he loved depicting a good fart.)
These factors, along with many others, came together in the 1880s and led to a seismic shift in Ensor’s work. He painted skeletons engaged in all manner of activity and put people in grotesque masks, often influenced by those he’d seen in Japanese prints.
“Rather than something that conceals, it becomes something that reveals,” says Allan. “He reveals something of absurdity and stupidity. He distorts the features to satirize.”
All of this makes Ensor’s work feel terrifically contemporary: the raw humor, the comic book color palette, the off-the-charts levels of disdain for every kind of authority. If he were alive today, he could have ruled Comic-Con.
Moreover, Ensor’s practice sketches of masks, which I’ve embedded above, feel like studies for proto-emoji. (Which makes me think that if the Getty really wanted to create a cool gift shop item, they’d start with some downloadable Ensor emoticons.)
This all began with paintings such as the one at top: a skeleton, sitting quietly in a comfortable domestic setting, reminding us that even in the most mundane activities, we aren’t free of ourselves.
“The Scandalous Art of James Ensor” is on view at the Getty Center through Sept. 7, 1200 Getty Center Drive, West Los Angeles, getty.edu. On Aug. 7 at 7 p.m., a group of contemporary artists -- Marc Trujillo, Tom Knechtel and Laurie Lipton -- will discuss the ways in which Ensor’s work has inspired them.
Object Lesson: When James Ensor turned to skeletons and satire. By Carolina A. Miranda. Los Angeles Times, July 31, 2014.
The James Ensor retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art will affect many viewers like the detonation of a bomb whose fuse has been fizzing inconspicuously for a century. It concerns a titanic exception to standard accounts of Western art since the late nineteenth century. The maniacal Belgian Ensor (1860-1949) was an outlier on purpose. He rarely strayed far, during a career of seventy-six years, from the attic of his family’s house and souvenir shop—it sold seashells, Chinese goods, carnival masks, and whatnot—in the small seaside resort town of Ostend. Some of his imagery is familiar enough: cavorting skeletons; demonic figures; moma’s own delicately brushed and colored nightmares, “Tribulations of Saint Anthony” (1887) and “Masks Mocking Death (Masks Confronting Death)” (1888); and the overwhelming, mural-size magnum opus, “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889” (1888), which swamps a diminutive Jesus, on a donkey, in mobs of grotesques and flurries of incongruous banners and signs—one for Colman’s Mustard greets the Saviour. (That painting never leaves the Getty Museum, in Los Angeles.) But I doubt that anyone not a specialist will be fully prepared for this show’s violent grandeur. I wasn’t, though I’ve always liked Ensor, considering him nearly the peer of Edvard Munch as a fugitive shooting star of the Northern European fin de siècle. For many years, I kept a flimsy poster of an 1898 Ensor etching, “Hop-Frog’s Revenge,” illustrating a gaudy tale by Edgar Allan Poe, Scotch-taped to the back of my office door, until it disintegrated. I never quite knew why, but now I see that the tableau of figures chained together, and being burned alive, in the air of a cavernous hall, before masses of tiny onlookers, distills in its dense web of energetic marks an elixir of pure, sweet malice—lending comfort to crotchets that aren’t scarce among writers in peevish solitude. The moma show affirms Ensor as a driven comic of the innocently malevolent id: part Lenny Bruce, part Richard Pryor, all sneering cheek. He employed his first-rate aesthetic acumen to pound home one nasty joke after another.
Ensor’s
life story makes his eccentricity predictable and his greatness astonishing.
Except for his father, an English drunk who died of exposure in a doorway when
Ensor was twenty-seven, he grew up in a family of women: grandmother, mother,
aunt, sister. His sexuality is opaque. He could be stunningly misogynistic,
characterizing womanhood, in a poem from 1925, as a “horrible cesspit, teeming
with leeches.” He could also be gallant, as in recounting his nativity on “the
day of Venus,” a Friday: “At my birth Venus came toward me, smiling, and we
looked long into each other’s eyes. She smelled pleasantly of seawater.” From
the age of twenty-eight, he had a lifelong companion, Augusta Boogaerts, an
innkeeper’s daughter whom he did not marry and with whom he never cohabited. A
painting from 1891 or 1893, not in the show, displays her as a heavyset woman
trying to lure him into the water at the beach, as he shrinks back. It calls to
mind James Thurber’s theme of matronly battle-axes and hapless
milquetoasts—though this particular wuss wasn’t shy about casting himself, on
occasion, as Jesus Christ. (That’s him on the donkey in the “Entry Into
Brussels” and nailed to the Cross in a drawing from 1886, “Calvary.”)
Nor was he
an easygoing friend to members of his own sex. Having achieved leadership, in
1883, of a Brussels-centered group of avant-garde painters, the Twenty, he
seethed when his comrades shifted their fancy from developments of his early
style—thickly layered, dark-hued paint, suffused with smoldering light—to the
shimmering Neo-Impressionism of Georges Seurat. He became “an alienated army of
one,” the show’s curator, Anna Swinbourne, writes in the catalogue, and he
holed up in Ostend for good, decisively turning his attention from naturalistic
interiors, portraits, and other things of this world to stuff of another that
was visible only to himself. He specialized in funny and frothing satirical
assaults on doctors, judges, priests, politicians, King Leopold II (who
nonetheless knighted him, in 1903), and humanity as an unlovely whole. As often
happens with intensely febrile young talents—including Munch, who, like Ensor,
took to repeating the motifs of his early masterpieces, to mediocre effect—he
calcified as he approached middle age. Ensor’s art after 1900 or so is
generally feeble, though sometimes still infectious. Having got into your head,
even once, he stays there like unforgettable music.
Ensor
painted like an angel while conceiving like a devil. His ability is apparent
from the start, in conventional parlor scenes, landscapes, and cityscapes
marked by phenomenal tonal subtlety, coloristic charm, and visceral touch. He
absorbed, and turned to fine account, influences of Courbet, Manet, Turner, and
Whistler. An 1882 picture of a woman at lunch, “The Oyster Eater,” rehearses
virtuoso effects of light on food, flowers, and glassware with contemptuous
nonchalance. Ensor’s gifts suited him for any number of stylistic directions.
“Children Dressing” (1886)—oddly titled, given that no clothes are evident in
the scene of naked kids in a hotly colored bourgeois interior—anticipates the
mature Bonnard. And the amazing “Skeletons in the Studio” (1900), with a
harmonic clutter of individually piquant items in a sun-washed room, calls so
strongly to mind certain works by Matisse that it might dent, a little, one’s
appreciation of the Frenchman.
But
weirdness proved to be destiny for Ensor. It is announced in the show by the
peculiar identity of an enraptured connoisseur: “Skeleton Looking at
Chinoiseries” (1885/1888). Why paint reality when irreality presents so many
richer possibilities? Here he connected with deep traditions of his Northern
Renaissance forebears Bosch and Brueghel. This orientation, outfitted with the
visual inspirations that were ready to hand in the snazzy kitsch of his
mother’s shop, the extravagant local Mardi Gras, and popular broadsheet
illustration, channelled his ambition and gave it tremendous propulsive force.
All that was needed was a formal repertoire that would invest fantasy with the
downrightness of fact.
Ensor’s
breakthrough came, between 1885 and 1887, by way of drawing: big scenes (one is
nearly seven feet high) from the life of Christ, done mainly in crayon. The
subject is incidental to the technique. Ensor practiced varieties of line that
alternately congeal into solid matter and, thinning, dissolve into light, with
emphases ranging from shouts to whispers. This prepared him to be one of the
foremost modern masters of etching, as in “Hop-Frog’s Revenge” and the
delectable “My Portrait in 1960” (1888)—as a skeleton. Assimilated to painting,
the exercise fostered a prehensile feel for a oneness of figure and ground:
foregrounds shoved back and backgrounds yanked forward, with unearthly light
their unifying element. Ensor’s best compositions register fully, with a bang,
at first glance, leaving you to savor at your leisure their details of
description and graces of execution. He strengthened the effect with dauby, greasy
paint surfaces you can practically taste and smell.
Ensor was a
far more substantial painter than Munch, though, I believe, a lesser artist.
Munch’s rushed crudities of style direct attention to the emotional urgency of
his subjects, which pertain to specific experiences of life, love, anxiety, and
death: modernity as an affliction of the heart. With Ensor, we sense
psychological pressures too unbearable to be confronted except indirectly, by
defensive means of mockery and rant. Not for nothing was he obsessed with
masks. Another handicap is an occupational hazard of comedy: how quickly and
utterly fashions in humor become dated. Ironies pertinent to clowns and
masquerade have long since been fairly exhausted for us (unless drolly
humanized, à la the Muppets). It would take a susceptible soul to reward the
moma show with Ensor’s strenuously sought response of laughter out loud. You
had to be there, in a Belgium that the artist evoked with lyrical sarcasm in
1924: “Yes, our actions are pictorial, our inventions are enormous, our
thoughts are tragicomical, our temptations are burlesque, our desires are born
of the flatlands, our paradises are made of dough and condensed milk, and our
endearments are made of butter.” ♦
The Id
Factor. By Peter Schjeldahl. The New Yorker, June 29, 2009
Urban
avant-gardist or small-town loony? The Belgian painter James Ensor, who has a
survey of hilarious, gruesome beauty at the Museum of Modern Art, is a puzzle
to fans and strangers alike, a classic insider-outsider.
He knew all
the right art-world people but hated most of them and was sure they hated him.
He was an aggrieved traditionalist with a pop-culture itch, equally entertained
by Rubens and tabloid cartoons. He was a sophisticated artist who helped shape
early Modernism, not in a Paris studio but in an attic room over a novelty shop
in a resort town on the North Sea.
Although
Ensor has long been a fixture in the art canon, he is also a fugitive presence.
My guess is that a lot of people know his name without knowing quite who he is.
Who can blame them? He’s hard to pin down. Gothic fantasist, political
satirist, religious visionary: one minute he’s doing biblical scenes, the next
the equivalent of biker tattoos, in a style that veers between crude and
dainty.
Just
consider his self-portraits. Within the span of five years in the late 1880s he
depicted himself as a cross-dressed dandy, a rotting corpse, a bug, a fish,
Albrecht Durer and a crucified Jesus. Clearly that attic room was a crowded,
cacophonous place, and the MoMA show, though airily installed, puts us right
inside it.
Ensor was
born in Ostend, Belgium, in 1860, and his life began with uncertainties. His
father, an Englishman, was probably an alcoholic and a bankrupt. The family’s
main income came from the Ostend shop owned by his Belgian mother’s family, an
antiques-and-souvenirs emporium selling china, taxidermic specimens and grotesque
carnival masks.
Ensor
studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, immersing himself in
Bosch and Rembrandt, as well as in modern realists like Courbet and Manet. Goya
and Turner, artists “obsessed with light and violence,” as he put it, became
favorites. He aligned himself with a circle of painters who were politically
leftist — anti-imperial,
anti-clerical, pro-worker — and
aesthetically progressive. In 1883 they formed a group called Les Vingt, or the
20, and organized a salon that drew contemporary artists from across Europe,
including Monet and Seurat.
Ensor
exhibited in the salon for a decade, but he had a bitter parting of ways when
several of its members converted to neo-Impressionism, while he held firm to a
dark-hued realist path. The early paintings at MoMA, crumbly still lifes and
gravy-brown interiors, are in this style and get things off to a lugubrious
start.
Most of the
interiors are of Ensor’s family home. After a few years in Brussels, Ensor
moved back to Ostend; he would never leave again for any extended period. He
had many friends, and a long-term romantic attachment, but never married. His
top-floor studio was over the shop, and from there he could look down on narrow
streets and see beach and sea, and a grand expanse of sky.
The space
was cramped, but that was O.K. It encouraged up-close, detailed work and led
him to develop a method for making large-scale drawings from pasted-together
sheets of paper. He brought lots of masks up from the shop, along with old
clothes, and improvised models from them. With reproductions of art he admired,
along with his own pictures, on the walls, and a human skull perched on his
easel, the sources for his work were in place.
All these
sources began to cohere in the painting called “The Scandalized Masks” from
1883, a kind of stripped-down, bad-dream version of a family portrait. A man
sits at a bare table in a bleak room, a wine bottle at hand. A woman enters
brandishing what looks like a flute or a stick. Both figures wear big-nosed
masks. He cowers; she stares through dark-tinted spectacles. It is a chilling,
hilarious moment in a drama that is also a farce, a Punch-and-Judy skit
scripted by Zola. Death, in the guise of an avenging grandmother, comes to
claim an incautious tippler.
Around the same
time Ensor was painting from nature: cloud-filled landscapes, or skyscapes,
filled with the North Sea’s churning weather. But these too implied threatening
stories. In a painting called “Fireworks” the night sky is a curtain of fire.
In “Adam and Eve Expelled From Paradise” the banishing angel explodes like a
midair bomb. And there’s the extraordinary “Tribulations of Saint Anthony,” in
which sky and sea dissolve into one great fetid pool.
All three
pictures date from a single year, 1887, when some eschatological strain in
Ensor’s thinking was reaching a fever pitch. A year later he would complete his
grandest epic, “Christ’s Entry into Brussels” in 1889, which isn’t in the show.
(It’s owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and didn’t travel.) But
he had already produced, a few years earlier, drawings of comparable ambition
and heat.
One, called
“The Lively and Radiant: The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem,” from 1885, is
gigantic: nearly seven feet tall and done on a giant piece of paper. The setting
is an immense proscenium theater, which is also a city street, with an army of
helmeted extras marching toward us, the panicked audience. Signs hang
everywhere, advertising art (“Les Impressionistes”), commerce (“Charcutiers de
Jerusalem”), politics (“Mouvement Flamand”) and celebration (“Hip hip hurrah”).
In the middle of the tumult, like a tiny light, is Jesus riding an ass.
An Ensor
scholar could probably crack all the coding. And anyone who lingers over its
scrim upon scrim of graphite lines will recognize a formal tour de force. But
it’s more than that: it’s an entry point into conceptual and emotional realms
with few clear guideposts. The drawing is, after all, absurd and freakish, like
Rembrandt’s “Hundred Guilder Print” turned into wallpaper. Is the result in any
way a devotional image? A social statement? A take-no-prisoners travesty?
Ensor
didn’t say, but was convinced that the art world despised it. He was acutely
sensitive to what he saw as a wholesale critical rejection of his art, impelled
by a “viciousness beyond all known limits.” Much of his work from the late
1880s onward was a response to this perception, a statement of exultantly
defiant martyrdom.
He depicted
himself beheaded, dissected, nailed to the cross. In one tiny painting he becomes
a pickled herring pulled apart by two grinning critic-skeletons. In an etching
we see him urinating against a public wall on which is scrawled “Ensor est un
fou” — “Ensor is a nut job.”
Oddly,
gradually, his fortunes changed. In 1895 the Belgian government he mercilessly
lampooned bought one of his early paintings. Collectors began to show interest.
Writers said nice things. There were retrospectives. Ensor began to soften.
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He spent
time, as always, in his studio, hemmed in by masks and other props, mostly
painting duplicates of his own past works, both to earn money and in the hope
that, with copies, his art had a better chance of physically surviving. (He
made prints for the same reasons.) In 1929 the king named him a baron. By the
time he died in Ostend in 1949 he was a national hero.
I find this
story of official adulation astonishing. Were people really looking at his art — at the death’s heads, the Jesus pictures, the figures of defecating rulers and
ministers perched like crows on a fence — and understanding what they saw? Maybe it all made sense after the
killing field that was World War I. Or were they clueless, or just
uninterested, as many quick-looking viewers today may be, for whom Ensor is a
piece of cultural arcana preserved beyond its useful time?
He will
certainly never be popular. He’s as much a visionary as van Gogh and a far more
imaginative neurotic than Edvard Munch. But he was inconsistent in matters of
style and polish. And he didn’t paint a “Starry Night” or a “Scream.” What he
did paint — basically a
medieval dance of death choreographed in personal, topical modern terms — most of us don’t relate to or want to hear about, though I suspect some artists do.
The MoMA survey, which has been organized by Anna Swinbourne, an assistant curator at the museum, with Jane Panetta, and the art historian Susan M. Canning, is an artist’s-artist show. It will appeal to anyone trying to negotiate an insider-outsider perch, anyone obsessed by violence and light, anyone who knows that loony is relative, that art is reality seen from a high small place, that the distance from a joke to a shock to a prayer is short.
From
Ensor’s Curiosity Shop, Nightmares of Gruesome Beauty. By Holland Cotter. The New York Times, June 25, 2009
The painter Terry Winters first came upon James
Ensor’s “Tribulations of Saint Anthony” in the mid-1960s as a teenage art
student wandering through the Museum of Modern Art. The unsettling vision stuck
out, he said, amid the Cézannes, Gaugins and van Goghs.
Ensor’s
merging of real-life imagery and abstract forms eventually inspired Mr. Winters
to pursue a parallel course, using magnified images of algae, cells, embryos,
fungi and hives. His admiration for Ensor never abated, as is now evident in an
audio tour that he recorded to accompany the current Museum of Modern Art
retrospective of Ensor’s work. “Everything he touched, he transformed into
something remarkable,” Mr. Winters said recently in an interview in his TriBeCa
studio.
Among contemporary artists such fascination with Ensor is hardly rare. Born in 1860, in the seaside resort of Ostend, Belgium, he spent much of his life sequestered in a cluttered apartment above his family’s curiosity shop. His carnivalesque scenes of crowds viewed from his attic window; his irascible portrayals of the monarchy, the clergy, the military and society in general; his shimmering depictions of the external world amid his own inner demons; and his use of light to add or dispel romance are credited with presaging the Surrealists and German Expressionists in the early 20th century. And 60 years after his death he is making his mark on the 21st.
Ensor’s
work, the best of which offers wickedly funny, fantastical twists on the master
painters he spent his youth copying — Rembrandt,
Turner, Daumier, and Manet — has surged in
popularity among a new wave of contemporary artists who are incorporating
elements of his across various mediums.
“Ensor
would take what was considered low art — popular imagery, and illustration — and put it in a high-art context of a drawing or a painting,” said
Susan Canning, an art historian and a consultant for the MoMA show, who is
writing a book about Ensor. “A lot of artists today see that accent on process.
They are trying to bridge that gap, incorporating a cartoony style in their
artwork.” She added that Ensor speaks to an interest among today’s artists in
making socially aware depictions of contemporary experience.
A defining
aspect of his current vogue is the tremendous range — in age, nationality and artistic styles — of the artists claiming his work as inspiration. Jakub Julian
Ziolkowski, whose nightmarish paintings are in the New Museum’s “Generational:
Younger Than Jesus” exhibition in Lower Manhattan, was an eager young artist
attending high school in Poland when he stumbled across reproductions of
Ensor’s work in a magazine he coveted called Great Painters. The sculptor Huma
Bhabha, 46, discovered Ensor’s work while studying art history in high school
in Karachi, Pakistan, where she grew up. And Mr. Winters, 60, counts as a
pioneer in the current wave of Ensor disciples.
As Mr.
Ziolkowski noted recently, “For every one of us Ensor’s works have a different
meaning.”
For Ms. Bhabha, “what attracted me to Ensor’s work was the idea of the grotesque in it,” she said, adding that she was also impressed by his aggressive brushstrokes, and garish colors. In a way, she said, “you could describe what I’ve been doing in my recent work as taking a face from a crowd, and examining it in three dimensions.” Referring to her sculptured heads as masks — an Ensor trademark — she pointed out that they simultaneously reveal “what is in the front, and what is behind, and what you can see through.”
George
Condo, whose paintings present virtual funhouses of art historical references
and distortions, compares Ensor’s “strange cast of characters,” to Modigliani’s
“long necks and blue eyes,” and Picasso’s iconic women. “I like when an artist
invents his own identifiable species,” he said, during a recent interview. In
his own 2005 painting, “Symphony #1,” Mr. Condo said, “I thought about the cast
of characters I’ve been working with throughout my career, all sitting together
in a kind of audience.”
The artist Tony Oursler, recalling how “the skeletons, clowns and puppets floating off into space” looked like effigies, in works like “Tribulations of Saint Anthony,” painted in 1887, claimed Ensor as a fellow “above-the-shoulders kind of artist.” Mr. Oursler, best known for his videotaped projections of talking heads on pillows, added, “His work signals the birth of psychiatry, of analysis, and the exploration of the mind.”
“I was
working on the show for maybe two months,” she said, during a recent interview,
“when my husband was doing The Times’s Sunday crossword puzzle.” The clue, she
said, was “Belgian artist, James, painter of masks.” The answer required five
letters. “I was so tired of this limited, stereotyped context for him.”
According
to Ms. Swinbourne, it was the resounding response to a 2001 show, “Between
Street and Mirror: The Drawings of James Ensor,” at the Drawing Center in SoHo,
that proved a more full-scale retrospective at MoMA was urgently needed. “There
was a tremendous outcry,” she said, adding that this outcry could be heard
particularly volubly among contemporary artists.
Ensor spent
the latter half of his life engaged in a very careful stewardship of his own
legacy. When his uncle died in 1917, Ensor moved into his house. There he
created a shrine to himself, which prominently showcased his earlier works,
considered highly controversial when he made them. Wassily Kandinsky and Emile
Nolde were among the many artists who trekked to Ostend to pay Ensor homage.
And in a nearby town Ensor famously lunched with Albert Einstein. Major museums
began acquiring and exhibiting his works. And in 1929 the king of Belgium
deemed Ensor a baron, and a major retrospective of his work was held at the
Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.
Still, it
is the early works, created from 1880 to the late 1890s — during what is now generally considered his
prolific, and combative, golden period — that have been most embraced by contemporary artists. They are the
focus of the MoMA show. Some of his devotees have already imagined the prospect
of seeing them.
The
Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca, who saw his first Ensor as a child in Buenos
Aires in the late 1960s, said recently that he feared seeing so many Ensors at
once “might feel afterward like you ate too many sweets.”
Mr.
Winters, though, relished the chance. During Ensor’s 20-year period of frenzied
productivity he “was possessed by such consistent genius,” Mr. Winters said.
“It’s so rare. He had perfect pitch.”
The
continued interest of his hallucinatory, adversarial works among contemporary
artists would have no doubt pleased Ensor, who in the mid-1890s wrote in a
letter to a critic, “In the distortion that light inflicts upon the line, I saw
the immensity waiting to be explored and a new vision to be established.”
How
Grotesque (but How Inspiring). By Dorothy Spears. The New York Times, June 23, 2009
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