James Ensor at Museum of Modern Art (2nd review)

The major three-month exhibit of the Belgian artist James Ensor at New York's Museum of Modern Art has just concluded, but it's worth more than a backward glance. Ensor lived a long life (1860-1949) but, like his better-known northern contemporary Edvard Munch, he crowded the most important part of his career into a couple of decades, and his really groundbreaking work into about half a decade. It was enough.

Albert H. Barr, commenting on Ensor's Tribulations of St. Anthony, remarked that he was the most important painter alive in 1887. When you consider that Ensor's competitors included Cézanne, Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Seurat—all then their prime— that's a serious compliment indeed.

The implication, of course, is that Ensor's importance didn't last that long, which is true. But between 1885 and 1890 he created a body of work whose influence reached deep into the 20th Century and is in many ways is still alive.

Ensor spent all his life as a bachelor in the Belgian port city of Ostende, which was becoming a resort town in the late 19th Century. His first works depict the city in somber colors, although his rich palette and his fascination with effects of light were apparent from the beginning. He was an accomplished painter by age of 20, and his study of a young boy, The Lamplighter (1880), shows a full assimilation of Manet, though his darker tones hark back to the Flemish masters of the Baroque.

Something startling

At this point Ensor was still precocious rather than original, although a work such as the Still Life with Vegetables (1882), with its vivid yet slightly wilted array, reveals a talent that was first-rate by any standard.

Looking more closely at this canvas, however, something startling appears: a serpent's head rearing up in a piece of okra. Is it "really" there? Just the suggestion of that snake, however far intended, disturbs a painting that seems just a bit off to begin with, a little too flush with decay. Thus does the echte Ensor begin to declare himself: the painter for whom nothing is quite what it seems to be, and who will soon plunge entirely into a phantasmagoric world the like of which hadn't been seen since late Goya, and which ultimately goes back to Hieronymus Bosch.

What signature would Bosch have chosen in a bourgeois world? For Ensor, it's the mask, a property item picked up from childhood in his father's curiosity shop.

Meaning of the mask

The mask makes its debut in a painting curiously titled The Scandalized Masks (1883), which shows a grotesquely masked woman coming through a door to face a man, likewise masked, who is seated at a small table with a bottle. The scene's sexual innuendo is strong, but its actual content is hidden: We cannot know what these people mean to each other, or guess what they will do. That is— as Ibsen and Strindberg were then making clear on the contemporary stage— the underlying narrative of bourgeois life, in which role-playing had imparted a vicious twist to instinct, and human faces assumed a bestial gaze that both expressed and concealed an inner corruption.

In Munch, the repressions of bourgeois life would saturate the pictorial surface with a diffuse anxiety. Ensor, however, made what was in some ways a more radical move: For him, the mask was the face, and what lay beneath it was not a traumatized identity— the speculative self of depth psychology— but the literal morbidity of death, represented by the skull and the skeleton. This would anticipate the 20th-Century theater of Meyerhold and Brecht, in which traditional "character" disappeared and only roles remained, mutable and more or less arbitrarily assumed.

Metastasizing crowds

By the mid-1880s, pictures by Ensor in which only one or two figures appeared— The Lamplighter, The Lady in Distress, The Drunkards— had given way to crowd scenes in which faces (rarely full figures) multiply like the cells of a single metastasizing organism, some comic or leeringly grotesque in the manner of the traditional Seven Deadly Sins; some seemingly popped up, jack-in-the-box style, through a trapdoor of hell.

This might seem politically reactionary— the notion of the modern crowd as a many-headed monster popularized by such writers as Gustave Le Bon. But a picture such as The Strike—an Ensor work from Barr's "important" year of 1887— shows considerable sympathy for working-class activism.

On one level, indeed, Ensor may be regarded as painting class conflict, a motif that climaxes in his greatest painting, The Entry of Christ into Brussels (not shown in the MoMA exhibition, although several impressive preliminary studies suggest it). Here, a "glorified" but actually impotent savior appears as a futile symbol of human solidarity in the partly festive, partly clashing ranks of a vast and surging crowd. To be horrified by mass society, as Robert Hughes suggests of Ensor, is neither to be unaware of the layers that compose it nor indifferent to the injustice it contains.

The violence to come

The Entry of Christ into Brussels may be the most extraordinary expression of urban anomie in modern art, as well as a prophetic anticipation of the mass revolutions to come in the 20th Century. Something of the same can be said for an extraordinary canvas titled Fireworks (1887 again), in which a pyrotechnic display fountains up in a great yellow-red fan above a darkened beach with tiny figures. This scene, too, is menacingly festive, with its hindsight suggestion of a giant annihilating explosion.

A terrible violence seems waiting for release in these works, most fully expressed in yet another 1887 work, Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise, in which something like a nebular explosion appears in the sky above the retreating figures, extruding a crab-like form.

But Ensor's art isn't primarily social, however significant this dimension of it may be. The demons he releases are less observed in the world than projected onto it, as Ensor's many, sometimes eerily distorted self-portraits suggest.

Cacophony in his head

This is not to say that what Ensor finds in himself he does not intuit in others— in other words, that his projected world, which at times takes on the obsessive density and repetition of outsider art, doesn't answer to a perceived external reality. The source, however, lies within.

One of the last of Ensor's major works, Self-Portrait with Masks (1899), shows a lunette of the artist, in the rakish feather hat that was his personal send-up of Rembrandt, surrounded by masks, idols and skulls. This was the crowd within him, the cacophony in Ensor's head that he was somehow able to put on canvas, thereby creating a mirror for our own darkest selves.

Ensor continued to paint with skill for another half century, but without further extending his vision. He had said it all rather quickly, but he said it exceedingly well.♦


To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.