James Ensor at the MoMA

My first encounter with James Ensor at the special exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

It’s hard to describe James Ensor as a painter. He was a member of the Belgian avant-gard, most prolific at the turn of the 19th century; he studied at prestigious art schools in France; he was dark, death obsessed, funny and insulting. Walking through the exhibit gives you a sense of his basic motifs and styles. Its not that he obviously matured and evolved as a painter, but his education from the École des Beaux-Arts nearly turned him into a much more generic painter at the time instead of the darkly comedic satirist that he is famous for becoming. Ensor wasn’t exactly an impressionist, but he painted through splotches and not the more simple inference of color and light through smaller brush strokes.

Much of his earlier work focused on basic scenes that one would expect from a painter at the time, depicting regular people on the street in their natural habitat, doing whatever it is they do. His subjects included two men slouched by a table in a drunken stupor on the street. One of his paintings which he constructed in an attempt to show off his education and traditional ability depicts a woman (modeled off of his sister) eating at a luxurious dining table adorned with every type of shiny glass surface one could image (the reflection of light meant to show-off his artistic eye).

Masks Mocking Death, 1888

In the late 1800′s that Ensor really created his own style and themes for his paintings, often focusing around masks, which his family sold in a shop under his studio. One of his most famous paintings, pictured left, depicts the character Death as a skeleton in the center, being teased by people in masks surrounding him. Ensor’s playfulness is obvious, the character usually reserved for paintings of fear and drama has been reduced to the butt of a joke by obnoxiously masked bullies. Its refreshing, even as Death is depicted as a dark and scary skeleton who looks as if he is attempting to hide behind an ironically white sheet and therefore is disarmed by Ensors other masked characters.

Skeletons Warming Themselves, 1889

The exhibit note’s Ensor’s penchant for inserting himself into his paintings, and one year later painted a few skeletons inhabiting his studio (and apparently his clothing) to warm themselves by his stove. Ensor references himself as the skeleton at the bottom of the painting under a cloth, his paint palette at his boots.  There’s something very funny about the skulls, and its emphasized in the exhibit where there is a similar photograph of Ensor himself painting in this studio by the stove. The skulls look like dolls who have snuck into the real work and put on Ensor’s clothes, not to haunt or torment anyone, but to play house.  These figures playing around Ensor’s studio are his muse, and he plays back with them with this painting.

After walking through most of the space, I started getting a feeling that the dates for all these paintings are very close, yet the man lived to be almost 90 (through two World Wars).  The reason for this is because he was most prolific in the period before WWI, and subsequently receded into his more obvious ideas of satirizing current events.

The Banquet of the Starved, 1915

The above painting depicts cartoonishly painted men at a banquet table, as well as one of his earlier (and substantially more famous) paintings Two Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring at the Top as a metaphor for those fighting over food while the conquerors of Belgium eat like, well, conquerors.  During WWI Ensor stayed in his native Belgium as the Germans invaded while the citizens suffered a food shortage.

While most of the pieces in MoMA’s exhibit came from abroad, there are a few notables missing, including his most famous Christ’s Entry into Brussels, for which his sketches are there to remind you what you’re missing. Other then that the exhibit is necessary and enjoyable coverage of an artist who is far too innovative and entertaining for him to be as little known as he is.