Chronicler of Now and Future Villany

As 21st-century civilization careens to new heights of barbarism and depths of human depravation, the work of the mentally-disturbed 19th-century Belgian painter and printmaker, James Ensor, takes on fresh relevance. Today's succesion of ever-more-luctuous world events seems to corroborate Ensor's macabre view of Man as singularly nefarious and vile.

It was this intensely pessimistic if ultimately realistic world view, expressed in a series of astonishing paintings and etchings, which made Ensor a pariah during his productive years as an artist, rejected not only by the right-thinking Flemish burghers of his native Belgium, but also by the members of Les Vingt, the avant garde group of painters of which he, himself, was founder and leading light.

History, however, is as ruthless as it is inevitable. While the other members of that aspiring Flemish vanguard are long forgotten, Ensor's legend looms larger and larger, and the descendants of the Belgian bourgeois are regretting that their forbears had not invested in some of Ensor's "outlandish and offensive" works of art.

Inauspicious Beginnings

James Ensor was born to an English father and a Flemish mother, shopkeepers in the coastal town of Ostend. They kept a store or market stall there which catered to the tastes of holidaymakers, selling bricabrac, toys, beach articles and the grotesque carnival masks which were traditionally worn in the local Shrove Tuesday processions. These parades and the masks were to figure prominently in Ensor's work, notably his monumental painting, Christ Entering into Brussels, monumental not only for its size but for its merciless depiction of the cruelty, vanity, hypocrisy and fatuousness which the artist perceived all around him in mid-19th-century Belgian society.

But the young artist, an acknowleged master in his 20's, did not silence his disgust. He expressed it in some of the most scathing and original works of art ever created. His reviled and renowned Christ Entering... is only the most famous, but the whole body of his work, which includes more than 160 etchings as well as hundreds of paintings and drawings, is a brilliant denunciation, not only of the morally bankrupt Belgian--and by extension European--society of his day, but also an advance on the homicidal folly which was to ensue in the 20th century.

My Mother or Sloth

Besides his paintings, Ensor's carbon drawings like My Mother or Sloth (1888), his gouache works like The Dangerous Cooks, etchings like Death Chasing the Flock of Mortals,(1896) and drypoints like Peculiar Insects (1886), in which he portrays himself as a beetle, established Ensor as a prime precursor of 20th-century expressionism, surrealism and Dada. Not that Ensor was the first Flemish painter of the grotesque. There were no shortage of earlier masters, including Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, with whose work the young Ensor was no doubt conversant.

The biographical notes on Ensor give few hints as to the genesis of the uniqueness of the man and the artist in his own time. Born into a conventional family, he studied history and religious painting at the Brussels Academy. Aside from these three years in Brussels, he hardly moved from his native Ostend. In the mid 1880's the artist, in his mid-20's by then, was forbidden by his family from marrying the girl he loved. This setback for the young man led to a personal crisis which brought on an ulcer and a decade of depression. In the early 1890's he actually tried to sell all the contents of his studio.

Great Art Leaps Straight Out of Life, But How?

The mental strife engendered by Ensor's early misfortune was a stroke of good luck for the history of art, as the deranged Flemish youth went on to unseal previously-unopened doors to human experience and artistic expression. Herein lies his greatness: an ordinary if sensitive young man who, by all rational indicators, should have spent his life attending early mass and painting virgens, was able to step outside of his own strait-jacketed dimension and achieve a significant advance in human perception. It's not clear how. Do the crude brushstrokes and garish colors of Christ Entering into Brussels,which he painted in 1888 at the age of 28, portray the microcosm or the macrocosm, the Resurrection or the Apocalypse? It would seem that they represent a bit of both, actually, not unlike life itself.

The Price of Fame and Fortune

Though Ensor survived well into the 20th century
--he died in Ostend in 1949 at the age of 89-- his fruitful period as an artist terminated soon after he achieved European recognition. By the age of 40 his work as a serious artist was over. In 1895, just two years after his vain attempt to sell his studio, the Belgian government bought a painting for the Brussels Musee des Beaux-Arts, his first museum sale. Then in 1898 he was granted an exhibit of drawings and etchings in Paris. This show was followed in 1899 by the acquisition by the Albertina in Vienna of some 100 etchings. Two years later the city of Ostend acquired his complete catalogue of graphic work.

In 1903, just 10 years after Ensor decided to abandon art as a life's work, King Leopold of Belgium (who had devoted virtually his entire life to the colonization and rape of the Congo...) proclaimed him "Chevalier du Ordre de Léopold." Other honors followed, culminating in the king's naming him a baron in 1929, coinciding with the first public exhibition of Christ Entering into Brussels,painted more than 40 years earlier. But in the last half century of his life Ensor produced no artwork worth of note. American art critic, Hilton Cramer, comments aptly: "The society he loathed had avenged itself by rendering him artistically impotent."