James Ensor’s studio in Ostende, Belgium was a sunny, attic space. You’d never guess this by the paintings he produced in it. A gray, sooty atmosphere blankets his early interiors and street scenes. Even a subject as emotionally tepid as two women having tea seems dominated by a hostile weather system.
Later, Ensor made brighter paintings. Much brighter. But these are so nightmarish as to make the weak of heart long for the simple gloominess of the early work.
Ensor, who lived from 1860 to 1949, is the subject of an appropriately strange and disturbing exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. He is one of the earliest of the modern expressionists, although the term hadn’t been invented yet. To get a sense of who Ensor was, try to imagine Hieronymous Bosch transplanted to 19th century bourgeois society from the hyper-religious atmosphere of the late medieval world, a painter with the same penchant for monsters and chimeras, but without the framework of Hell and damnation in which to express it.
As horrible as Bosch’s visions of torment were, after all, they took place away from the everyday world, in the imagined realms of Genesis or Judgment Day. Ensor’s settings, in contrast, are the familiar cafes and garrets of La Boheme, but inhabited by skeletons, ghouls and other grotesques.
When these characters first appear, in an 1883 painting called “The Scandalized Masks,” it is a plausible enough situation: A man wearing a pig mask, drinking alone in a dimly-lit café, greets a new arrival who is dressed as an old hag or witch. It looks like the end-of-the-night reunion of two revelers from the night’s Mardi Gras carnival.
Such celebrations were held every year in Ostend, a popular vacation spot. In fact, as the exhibit wall text explains, the grotesque and vulgar visages that sometimes fill Ensor’s canvases had plenty of other sources in Belgium’s Dutch-speaking popular culture, not to mention in Ensor’s personal life: his family sold masks in its seaside souvenir stand and Ensor’s eccentric grandmother had a penchant for dressing up in strange costumes.
But it’s where Ensor took this material that made him the Edgar Allen Poe of painting. Soon, you have cause to wonder if some of these horrible faces are not masks, after all, but the figures’ real faces. And when skeletons start painting pictures and the weird revelers start doing grisly operations with pans on the floor to catch the blood, you know it’s not carnival time anymore.
Although Ensor lived virtually to the middle of the 20th century, his most creative period was from 1880 to the mid-1890s, the focus of this show. Missing is his best-known masterpiece, the monumental “Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889,” in which the tiny figure of Jesus on a donkey is practically obscured by the swirling crowds (it’s owned by the J.Paul Getty Museum in California, and was deemed too fragile to loan). You can see others from this body of visionary paintings and drawings, in which Christ exudes a radiant, form-dissolving light.
If you’re looking for a wedge into Ensor, try following the light. He tends to use it in unexpected ways. Most artists — Goya, for example – employ a dark palette when trying to arouse our deepest fears. But Ensor goes the opposite way. The grimmer the subject, the brighter the light. But it’s a stark, pitiless, shadowless light, an operating room light, scarier than the dark, perhaps, because it leaves us no refuge.
It’s hard to classify Ensor. In fact, it’s impossible. At a time when many of his contemporaries were drawn to the pointillism of Seurat, an optical system, Ensor was using light to evoke both fear and religious feeling. He could also be a savage social critic, as evidenced by the caricatures and scatological cartoons that hang here right next to the paintings. And, whatever religious feelings stirred within him, they weren’t enough to save him from his obsession with death and what sometimes seems a horror in existence itself.
He was unique in so many ways, and because of that and because his work was deemed illustrational, he hasn’t received the attention bestowed on those within the modernist canon. That seems about to change.
