(The latest in a long line of
art exhibitions reviewed after they close)
“Ensor was a scenographer,
depicting a strange world that was neither tangible nor imaginary,
populated by inscrutable beings”
- Curator Luc Tymans
The Sunless Seaside
I first saw the work of the Belgian
artist James Ensor in an exhibition devoted to Carnival -
'Carnivalesque' at Brighton Museum, back in 2000.
Fittingly enough, for as we'll come onto, Carnival was prevalent in
his work, almost always at least implicit. Now any Carnival buff
knows the festival to be inextricably connected to it's ostensible
opposite - Lent. And so Ensor starts with Lent. Officially that's the
wrong way round, for Carnival was supposed to yield to Lent. But then
he was a somewhat contrary character, so let's follow his lead.
Take for example 'Afternoon in
Ostend' (1881), where figures sit primly at afternoon tea,
or the murky oil of 'The Bourgeois Salon' (1880,
above). The light at the window is able to strike up some white
echoes straight in front of it, but the single figure is determinedly
turned away. And the exteriors were little less oppressive. In
'Large View of Ostend (Rooftops of Ostend)' (1884,
below) those titular rooftops are crammed into the lower fifth of the
canvas, huddled below a tempestuous sky. Not unlike Sickert's Dieppe, there's a sense of unease to Ensor's Ostend, made
stronger for never being quite identifiable.
It's not an approach Ensor ever
entirely abandons. 'Flowers and Vegetables'
(below), dating from 1891, is that rare thing – a still life which
virtually leers out at you. The ruddy reds and lurid greens must make
for the most feral-looking vegetables in art history, as throbbing
with life as any Van Gogh nature scene. Set against that those
delicate blue bits of porcelain, it looks like the crusties have
taken over the garden suburb. You can uproot nature and even fetch
bits of it indoors, but it remains untameable.
But the underlying unease becomes more
palpable and more fantastical as Ensor went on. For in a remarkable
sea change, almost all of the successive works are devoted to what
'The Bourgeois Salon' shutters out. What is
repressed is shown as returning, quite frequently erupting. In
'The Haunted Furniture' (1880), an early example,
spirits rise from the sides of a great heavy wardrobe.
Skeletons At Work and Play
'The Skeleton Painter'
(1896, above) is one of many images using the skull or full skeleton.
The title is most likely some double-edged self-referential joke, the
skeleton who painted skeletons. We don't see the figure's hands, so
can't ascertain whether this is an animate skeleton or just someone
in a skull mask. Skulls and masks are placed around the studio,
suggesting either is possible. Though the eyeballed skull atop the
easel seems more animate than the figure. It's widely seen as a kind
of self-portrait, which would make that easel skull a kind of totem.
(He'd also create the etching 'My Portrait as a
Skeleton', 1889.)
Notably, there's no attempt to give the
skeleton any shock appeal. It's entirely unlike covers to Gothic
novels, with their long bone fingers stretching towards shrieking
maidens. For one thing, sunlight pours in the room. In fact it's the
'natural' 'Bourgeois Salon' which takes place in
the gloom, rather than this 'fantastical' work. And skeletons are
always painted naturalistically, or even casually, like they belong
to their environments. (See for example 'Skeleton Looking at
Chinoiseries', c. 1888/90.) TJ Clarke of the London Review of Books commended Ensor's
“ability to convince us that horror and absurdity are familiar
events, behaviours we all recognise from our daily round…
Garishness and matter-of-factness were faces of the same coin.”
The show suggests a local origin for
this imagery. The ongoing development of Ostend had disinterred mass
graves, the residue of the Eighty Years War, reminding us that the
past is rarely actually past. Remember the old Fall song lyric where
unearthed graves are found to be “disease ridden, dusty, organic -
and psychic”?
But it does also seem to be tapping
into the same themes as Mexican popular art. As I said of the British Museum's 'Revolution on Paper'
exhibition of Mexican prints:
“The skeleton figure acts
paradoxically, throwing emphasis onto the figures’ accoutrements
(bosses’ top hats versus peasant caps), whilst confirming that
these are only accoutrements for almost identical figures….
reducing us to the skeletons we all are underneath.” The face is
just mask for the skull, which less represents death than the
inescapable baseness of life.
Which is possibly most visible in
'Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring' (1891,
above). What's striking isn't the armless war between jaws, like the
figures are squabbling birds. Or even the way their tugging is
emphasised by the angle of the clouds. It's the fine-looking clothes,
the bizarre busby hat perched on the bone head. A human in a hat like
that might even seem deserving of our respect. Whereas a skeleton is
a ghoul, a savage mockery of status.
Masks Alive
Following an an 1908 description of him
by Emile Verhearen, Ensor has become known as “the painter of
masks”. To the degree where the show insists this is too limited a
frame, which needs busting open. Nevertheless, the motif is recurrent
in his work.
As already seen in 'The
Skeleton Painter' Ensor would casually mix his skull and
mask motifs up. And we perhaps shouldn't try too hard to disentangle
them. An artists' work rarely reduces to a neat set of symbols, which
you can come along and fix a key to. Nevertheless, while Ensor is
able to convey different expressions through skulls, the mask
inherently gives greater variety and so becomes a broader symbol.
And as with the skull, the mask had a
local connection for him. Ostend was home to the annual Ball of the Dead Rat, a carnivalesque masked ball. He even grew up, and
later made his studio, above a shop where his mother sold carnival
masks and similar goods.
And what did the mask mean in Carnival?
Not merely the way we see them now, as a form of disguise. The masks
were often associated with characters, and to don one was to
effectively become that character. And if anything Ensor pushes that
concept further. The masks often appears as the embodiments of
spirits, as if they were themselves animate. As Laura Cumming wrote in the Guardian, Ensor's work is “a
theatre where the masks can live their own existence.”
'Intrigue' (1890,
above) is so famous a work it's not just the poster image but has the
show named after it. (The last time I can think of that happening was Fuseli and the Tate's 'Gothic Nightmares' exhibition, back in
2006.) And here the figures seem not just living their own existence
but pressing into ours, massing at the front of the work like they're
about to erupt into our space. In particular the red coated woman
with the baby seems to be projecting out of the frame, while the
black slitted eyes of the main figure seem to be not even looking out
as us but on a point beyond us. The figures are less alive than
charged, animate energy virtually seething with
malevolence. The work almost literally exudes menace.
There's not a sliver of human flesh to
be found, the two hands gloved, the high collars - particularly that
raised black collar on the main figure - obscuring any join at the
neck. It's reminiscent of the trope in films such as 'The
Invisible Man' (1933), in which a figure is unwrapped to
reveal only an absence. Similarly, in 'The Astonishment of
the Mask Wouse' (1889, below) some figures seem to have had
their spirits desert them, leaving inert masks attached to husks of
clothing on the ground. The hand of the main standing figure is
upraised, as if she might magic motion back into them.
‘The Intrigue’
can also be traced back to an event in Ensor’s biography, but accurate or not that’s scarcely the point of the work – it’s
source not explanation. Overall, and typically of Ensor, the
painting's neither explicable as a scene nor reducible to a set of
symbols. And that’s kind of the point. It presents a kind of
erupting irrationality, against which we’re like the defensively
doubting rationalist in the horror film, stuttering about some pat
psychological explanation. Ensor himself declared “reason is the enemy of art.”
And this is not just to do with
Carnival but the childhood sense of animism, the feeling every object
in the world is possessed of a spirit unknowable to you. This can
seem charming, as we see children form attachments to inanimate
objects. But at the time, as those thoughts run through your head, it
meant even a domestic scene could seem charged with danger.
The Crowd As Collage
Okay, some social levelling,
masks...what else do you need to create Carnival? Of course, there
has to be a crowd. A party needs invites. And as if by magic Ensor's
other most famous work, 'The Entry of Christ into
Brussels', foregrounds this. (Represented here not by the giant, four-metre plus painting of 1888, but an 1895
etching, above.) Though Christ can be found in there if you search,
the work's more concerned with the figures which surround him.
They're a motley array, a jumble of individual heads – this is
crowd as collage.
The dominant notion has become that
there is something reductive and deindividuating about a crowd, that
being in one somehow makes you less than what you are. Yet when
you’re in a crowd you’re part of it and
yourself, at one and the same time. We all know this from experience.
And this precisely what Ensor depicts. They're not a deindividuated
swarm conjured up by popular phrases such as 'mob mentality', they're
individuals amassed.
And there's a juxtaposition between the
crowd and the neat military line of soldiers behind them. (A device
Ensor re-employs elsewhere, for example in 'The Strike',
1886.) They're like the buckling bottle whose task it is to contain
the frothing, fermenting alcohol. The crowd are shown at a physical
distance. But that's not how the work feels. Ensor
depicts crowds the way some artists do the sea, their teeming feels
like an invitation to dive in. To quote Laura Cumming again: “Ensor
is festive even when devastating or macabre”. The bawdy and the
grotesque are bedfellows.
And if Ensor was the painter of
anything, it wasn't masks but crowds. 'Skeleton
Painter', showing his studio strewn with masks and skulls,
can give rise to the notion he had a hermetic world-view - his
imagery cast no wider than the room about him.
And so he comes to be depicted as some
reclusive outsider artist, such as in Timothy Hyman's description of him as “working alone through
long, silent days in his fifth-floor attic high above the family’s
carnival shop.”
And yet, news though it may be to some,
the art world is not the world. Yes, Ostend insulated Ensor from the
art world, which he found confining and regulating. But that doesn't
mean he hid away from Ostend, like some recluse. Let's remember his
family shop was not selling antiques, but was outfitter to an ongoing
carnival tradition. And you can see that in the work, a love of the
crowd far too visceral to be theoretical.
There may, however, be one or two
elements of truth to this. Ensor is known to have anarchist
sympathies, and he went on to influence political artists, such as
George Grosz. And at times these can come out in the open. (For
example, the full-size version of 'Christ's Entry'
contains a banner proclaiming “Vive La Sociale”.) But he was not
primarily a political artist. He less saw the crowd as an instrument
of social change and more loved it for it's own sake, luxuriating in
it's disreputable tumultuousness. And of course these days we are
more wary of making clear, causal connections between Carnival and
revolt than others have been in the past. (Carnival yields to Lent,
remember?)
Further, Ensor exhibits a paradox
between an artist with a highly personalised cosmology, and one
influenced by folk traditions. And the two often come together in his
style. His compositions are often strangely arbitrary, heads and feet
lopped off by his borders like he ran out of room. Just as some
artists are Just Abstract Enough, perhaps we need a name for artists who are
Just Outside Enough. Artists who, like Ensor, had formal art training
and could draw conventionally when they needed, but didn't feel at
all beholden to it. Timothy Hyman suggests the term “exceptionals”, presumably
drawing on the twin meaning of ‘outside’ and ‘beyond’.
'The Baths at
Ostend'(1890, above), for example, is so crammed with comic
incident it's not entirely dissimilar from children's comic artists
such as Leo Baxendale. (If a more lewd variant.) In fact,
particularly with it's use of coloured pencil, it might even be a
child's drawing. It's noticeable how much emphasis there is on
voyeurism, with gapers down virtually the whole left side and the
monocled figure in the lower centre.
Not Even Past
Try again to find the actual Christ in
'Christ's Entry Into Brussels'. There's a short
cut, you can track him down by his halo, it's yellow an echo of the
sun. This Medieval device, which had long since passed from art's
vocabulary, makes a return. Similarly, 'Adam and Eve
Expelled From Paradise' (1887) uses a local Belgian
landscape for this Biblical fable. It's total uninterest in fidelity
to the Middle East again echoes Medieval art.
And while 'Christ's Entry'
might hide the title star in a crowd, Ensor often focused upon him.
For example in the late 'Christ In Agony' (1931)
or 'The Man of Sorrows' (1891, above) – where
he's painted as if saturated with ruddy reds, to the point where it's
hard to tell head and hair from blood. In fact it wouldn't be too
hard to believe the thing had actually been painted in blood. There's
none of the solemn dignity we're used to seeing given to Jesus, those
harshly over-exaggerated features look more savage than John the
Baptist.
To Ensor as with the Medieval artist
the halo's a transpiring symbol, yet the face and body of Jesus is
very much a real thing. His blood is not a religious thing, it's
thick red stuff. Like many Medieval religious images, it's more
macabre than moral.
All of which seems very much at odds
with our idea of art of this time. Tuymans comments that
Carnivalesque art had originally rebelled against Classicism,
conveying order through it's neat rules of composition. Whereas for
Ensor the dominant culture was Modernism, most of which he volubly
detested. It really comes back to the image of the disinterred
skeleton. Just as reason was a thin skin over the irrational, the
present was a barely coping mechanism for holding back the past. The
bodies just don't stay buried.
It's hard to find a term for the art
history he refers to. I guess the point was less that it was an
integral era, named and scrupulously annotated, and more that his
interest went to the gaps – past-Classical yet pre-Romantic. People
have sometimes seen an inheritance from his geographical forebearers, the Flemish Renaissance. There's Breugel's interest in the
culture of the common folk, and Bosch's phantasmagorias. When people
compare Ensor to Bosch perhaps they’re seeing a similar collision
between the Medieval and the contemporary, for all that the two
artists were working in different eras.
Held in the Academy's upstairs Sackler
gallery, this is a relatively small exhibition, comprising about
eighty works. So it's strange when curator Luc Tuymans sacrifices
space to works by Ensor's contemporaries, a piece by himself and at
one point a pointless fake video where an actor portrays Ensor
perambulating on the seafront. Tuymans is himself an artist,
considered well-known enough for his name to become incorporated into
the show's title. And while it is often artists who understand other
artists best, perhaps this sort of indulgent decision-making comes
with celebrity curators.
Conversely, the show does give space to
Ensor's prints and drawings. Though paintings are often held by
curators to trump other media, Ensor himself saw them as equally
important. In fact he prized his prints the highest, because they
were the easiest disseminated. Overall, while it would have been nice
to see a few more Ensors at this Ensor show, when even today he is so
often overlooked there's never any reason to knock seeing Ensors.
Coming soon! More
art exhibitions reviewed after they have closed. (While stocks last.)
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