James Esnor

By 2008, I had over five hundred art books in my home. As you know, I had more - but threw them out because I had simply no room. My collection covered everything from the cave painters to Luc Tuymans. For me the lives and work of the masters were not only a framework for my art - but also a road map for my life. I called many artists master – but only a handful brother. One such man was the Flemish visionary painter James Ensor (1860-1949.)

             

His art and life had haunted my imagination for the last four years – usually at my bleakest moments of despair - when I did not have even rage to keep me going. When I was younger, angrier and more optimistic - I would turn to the likes of; van Gogh or Munch to give me courage in my pursuit of my own art. However, by 2008 - the only story to really give me any consolation - and make me smile if not laugh - was the strange life of Belgian’s greatest artist of the twentieth century (sorry Magritte.)

             

I had first discovered his work when it was featured in a documentary on BBC 2 in the mid 1980s. His Self-Portrait in a Flowered Hat (1883) - jumped off the screen at me – with a jolt of recognition – the mother complex, the transvestism, the madness and the complete self-assured indifference - to the opinions of the world.

            

Having only seen a few of Ensor’s paintings in the flesh - I worried for weeks about writing something on him. Usually I thought it an unforgivable sin to write about art one had largely never seen in the flesh. However, in his case I had finally made a concession. After all who better to write about an eccentric man who lived with his mother, rarely left his house, painted in an attic, thought about death every day, thought he was a prophet, and travelled little outside his home town – than an artist like myself?

             

With other rebellious and revolutionary artists at the fag end of the nineteenth century like; Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin and Munch – Ensor struggled for decades to find a sympathetic audience. Perhaps their stories of rejection - had been slightly overdone by romantic biographers in the 1950s – van Gogh for example was just beginning to achieve some recognition when he killed himself. Certainly Ensor’s story of artistic neglect had been over played – largely because of Ensor’s own martyr complex. I think Ensor forever felt himself abused and neglected even when he had success. I also think that he was the kind of man who liked to complain. However, the fact remains that these seminal fathers of modern art – spent many years in the wilderness (literally and metaphorically) before their visions became understood.

             

Ensor was in his forties before he could financially support himself – until then his mother had kept him. His work was intensely disliked by critics and fellow artists. It was writers who supported him and eventually brought him the success he had craved in his youth. He was shy, neurotic and hypersensitive - he died unmarried and childless. He was rumoured to have an imitation mermaid in his studio made off fish-scales, monkey’s teeth and woman's hair. He is most famous today for his paintings of skeletons and masks – but he was in fact one of the most confusingly diverse artists in art history. Don’t expect to understand his art immediately – his work takes time. Many of his paintings are crammed with obsessive details and hidden meanings – so they demand prolonged study. He painted in oils on canvas, wooded panels and paper. He worked deftly in watercolours and also produced a huge body of etchings, and drawings. He could paint and draw like an angel or like a demon. He depicted; landscapes, seascapes, streets scenes, crowds of goggle-eyed people, portraits, interiors, still-lives, self-portraits, caricatures, masks and skeletons. His drawings like his paintings varied from highly skilled, almost magic realism – to his own brand of raw, inspired Expressionism. However, he produced most of his visionary masterpieces between 1876-1896 – after which he mostly copied his past glories and out-lived himself as an artist.

             

In conversation, he was constantly self-contradictory. He was one of those hilarious people who have no idea just how funny they are. At first, they laughed at him - but they ended up laughing with him. In his later years - when fans of his work came to visit him he would play his harmonium - and tell them he wished he had become a musician! I suspect this was his final attempt to frustrate the world.                                                                                                                                  

At first sight, Ensor’s work could appear to the conservative art lover; crude, ugly, creepy and mad. However, the closer one looked at his fantastic and visionary paintings - the more skilled, beautiful and prophetic they became.

             

James Ensor was born on April 13 1860, in Ostend a seaside town in Belgium with a population of just 16,000 at his birth. He lived his life with the lapping, rolling and crashing sounds of the Atlantic sea against the beach and pier of Ostend.

            

 His father was an English engineer - who had travelled to America to find work but had returned to Europe because of the Civil War. His mother was a native of Ostend where she ran a souvenir shop that sold; trinkets, toys, shells, masks, seashells, Chinese goods and all manner of curiosities. A year later Ensor’s sister Mariette (who the family called Mitche) was born. They would have a close relationship and she would pose for many of his early naturalistic canvases. At the age of twenty-one Mitche married a Chinese man - complete with oriental robe and pigtail - who was passing through Ostend. Mitche had a girl with him but then abandoned by him.

             

Ensor only started school at the age of thirteen – and he lasted just two years in the Collage Notre-Dame in Ostend. He loathed school – but did not outwardly rebel. Instead, he adopted an indifferent and resistive attitude towards his teachers. Two years later his parents took him out of Notre-Dame - and left him free to daydream, roam the beach and take up drawing. His father - recognizing his son’s talent - sent him to take lessons with two undistinguished local watercolorists. He later said of them: “They initiated me professorially into the fallacious banalities of their dreary, narrow-minded and still-born craft.” (Jacques Janssens, James Ensor. Switzerland: Bonfini Press, 1978, P18.)

             

Ensor’s mother was far less sure of this path for her son, and would have preferred he took up a real profession. Her husband idled his days reading, drinking and socializing in the cafes - and no doubt feared that her only son would become a burden too – she was right.

             

Even in his most apparently simple, early paintings – Ensor could create pure magic. One of the first such works was Bathing Hut (1876) - a small oil painting - of a mobile beach cabin by the sea. On first sight, it seemed to me to have the ethereal softness of a watercolour – so soft were Ensor’s brushmarks. On second sight, it seemed a humdrum scene. However, by the third look – I was hooked! He painted this small canvas at the age of sixteen – and his painterly skills were already evident. He was already able to create a magical and uncanny version of reality on canvas. It as though - he could actually paint - the air. You felt the wind in your face and the sand beneath your feet.

             

In 1875 – Ensor’s family moved to 23 Vlaanderendreef (now Vlaanderenhelling) on the corner of Noordstraat (now Van Iseghemlaan) in Ostend – where James would live with his family until 1917 - surrounded by his paintings and a life time of collecting what some might have called junk. On the ground floor, his mother ran her souvenir shop.

             

Ensor remembered his family home as such: “My grandparents had a shop in Ostend, in the Kapucijnenstraat, where they sold shells, lace, rare, stuffed fishes, old books, engravings, weaponry, chinaware… It was an inextricably confused jumble of heterogeneous objects; several cats knocked over things, somewhere some parrots produced a deafening noise, and there was a monkey… The shop smelled of mold; the stench of the monkey’s stale urine filled the shells and cats walked over the precious lace. Yet, during the summer season the most distinguished visitors entered the place: the Emperor Wilhelm I, then Prince of Prussia; Leopold I, King of Belgium; the duke of Brabant; the Count of Flanders; The Duke of Ossana; the Duchess Douglas Hamilton. My mother amused all of them with her wit.” Indeed! (This quote is taken from - Between The Street and The Mirror: The Drawings of James Ensor. Ed. Catherine De Zegher, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, P223.)

             

At seventeen, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. From day one - when he was forced to draw from the antique casts – he knew he would not fit in. His attitude was profoundly anti-classical, anti-authoritarian and modern. In three years at the Academy, the best he ever got was a second prize for a drawing from an antique head. However, he continued his studies in the Academy in his own dogged, insular way – no doubt convinced he should be teaching them. Later he was to say that he had learned nothing in this: “establishment for the near blind.” (Jacques Janssens, James Ensor. Switzerland: Bonfini Press, 1978, P20.)

             

While in Brussels, he met and befriended the much older Ernset Rousseau - Rector of Brussels University and his young wife Mariette – who were both lovers of science and art. Ensor was to also befriend their son - who had the same name as his father. Their friendship was his rock of safety – through many dark years of isolation and ridicule.                                                     

After three unspectacular years in the Academy - Ensor returned to Ostend. Apart from a few trips to Brussels, Amsterdam and Paris, he was never to leave his hometown again.

             

He converted the fourth-floor attic of his parent’s home into a studio and began painting a series of Impressionist inspired landscapes and realist portraits. However, it was his interiors with his family members sitting inside - that I found haunting. Had anyone ever painted curtains with such tenderness – as flimsy barriers to a harsh external world of frightening people? I wondered to myself.

            

Ensor liked to have photographs taken of himself and his friend Rousseau Jr. - messing about. In one black and white photo - Ensor and his friend Ernest - play-fight with bones on the beach. In another photo - Rousseau plays the role of a surgeon - removing the “stone of madness” from Ensor’s head! Later Ensor would use these and other photographs as stimulation for his paintings. As a young man, Ensor liked to play his flute at parties, jeer at hunchbacks in the street - or mock the stallholders at the fish market. You could say he loved causing mischief - and I thought that was the best way to understand his strange and comical work. When he would walk the streets of Ostend, he was jeered at by passers-by and gangs of children. They nicknamed him ‘Compere-la-mort’ (Death’s Confederate.)

             

Ensor’s attic studio had a fine view of the streets’ of Ostend outside – which he would paint repeatedly – often when they were crowded with Mardis Gras revelers, military regiments, or marching bands. He sat and watched the world pass by. In the course of his life, Belgium was invaded three times. First by; Bismarck’s Prussian army - then the Kaiser’s Storm-troopers and finally - by Hitler’s Panzer Grenadiers. They were all then beaten out - by the French, English and American armies. Sitting in his little room dispensing his rage and fears on canvas - but always trying to remain polite in real life – he must have wondered at a world that thought him the madman!

             

At the age of nineteen, Ensor painted his first mask paintings. Ostend was known for its masks and his family home was full of them. The masks harked back to fourteenth century farce, the danse macabre, paganism and witchcraft. However, there was nothing schematic about the way Ensor painted masks – each had its own peculiar identity – depicting different kinds of personalities, vices or stations in society. In fact, it almost appeared to me that the masks were coming to life. When I was younger, I was somewhat sceptical of Ensor’s masks and skeletons. I worried that it might be a bit contrived. However, Ensor lived from birth with these strange objects. He played with them. He befriended them. Therefore, it was utterly natural for him to paint them.

             

In 1881 – Ensor started exhibiting – to poor reviews, little public enthusiasm and some ridicule. Over the following years, many of his submissions were rejected and when he did show - he received scathing reviews.

            

By the mid 1880s fantastic and macabre imagery entered into his work. Groups of masked people met in rooms, skeletons fought each other - and bourgeois rooms were littered with; skulls, dolls, masks, puppets, books and bones.

             

Ensor never painted from the nude life-model – because his mother disapproved. So most of his nudes came from his head or were reworked from others artists paintings and drawings. Those nudes that there are - tend to be comical or threatening (in one drawing of a big breasted woman he drew satirical faces over the nipples.) In fact, I wondered if he thought of sex much at all - I knew he thought of death every day.

             

Like his life – Ensor’s paintings were full of contradictions. In the same year (sometimes in the same month) - that he painted a fantastic and gruesome pair of skeletons – he could also paint a beautiful and sedate still-life. Yet all of his work was stamped with his DNA. He painted what he wanted – when he wanted. Art was his solitary amusement. He delighted in confusing and playing with his audience and himself. This was made even more clear in his drawings - where half a page might depicted a fully shaded realist drawing of a fireplace – but on the other half of the page odd faces, masks and goblins appear out of thin air - threateningly.

             

Every great painter has his or her own idiosyncratic pallet. Ensor’s brittle whites, steely blues, fire-engine reds, emerald greens and sad violets - were totally his own. His greatest paintings seemed to me to radiate light – which miraculously appeared to come from behind the paintings somewhere.

             

Ensor was an obsessive reader and loved the writings of Balzac, Edgar Allen Poe, and was very fond of Rabelais and Cervantes’ Don Quixote – whose flights of fancy mirrored Ensor’s own. As a painter he was equally omnivorous looking intently at; Rembrandt, Chardin, Watteau, Rowlandson, Turner, Courbet, Delacroix and as a Belgian of course he was steeped in Brueghel the Elder and Bosch.

               

In 1883 Octave Maus created the circle Les xx (The Twenty) an avant-garde group - which welcomed the work of radical and unpopular painters, writers and musicians from all over Europe. Les Vingt organized exhibitions of work by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, August Rodin, Georges Seurat and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. It was at one of the Les xx shows that van Gogh sold his only painting for 400 Francs in 1889. Ensor quickly joined the group but his submissions were frequently rejected or accepted in part only. Even here, his work was often considered too outrageous to be shown. After another of his submissions - this time to Brussels Salon of 1884 was rejected – he wrote a savage pamphlet mocking his old professors in the Academy. It only served to put even more peoples backs up. However Ensor became addicted to polemics and went on to take issue with things like vivisection and the modernization of Ostend. I had no doubt that if he were alive in my today - he would have been a compulsive blogger!

             

Suddenly in 1887 – Ensor’s father died. Ensor drew tender drawings of his dead father in bed. However, rather than darken – his pallet exploded with ever more daring juxtapositions of colour.

             

In 1888, Ensor painted his masterpiece Christ Entry Into Brussels, 1889. It depicted Ensor’s fantasy of the day when Christ would enter Brussels. The historian Heusinger von Waldeck has suggested that this massive canvas might have come as a professionally competitive reaction to Seurat’s Grande Jatte - which had recently made a big impact.

             

At first, it was hard to see Christ – as he rode on a donkey in the background of the canvas. For ones attention was first grabbed by the army band and Mardi Gras revealers - that thronged the foreground. To the lower left a couple French-kissed and seemed oblivious to Christ’s presence. The largest red banner in the parade read; “Vive La Sociale” (Long Live Social Progress.) Ensor had outrageously given the figure of Christ his own features – but this was nothing new for him. Ensor frequently depicted himself as Christ – misunderstood, reviled but prophetic. Sometimes he also depicted himself as the devil – demonic and sly.

             

He had previously drawn blasphemous images like Ensor/Christ in the temple – expelling the moneylenders – or even of himself as Christ crucified on the cross. There were no easy answers in Ensor’s art – ‘good’ people had a secret dark-side - and the divine touched ‘bad’ people.

             

Christ Entry Into Brussels - was a true masterpiece in the old-fashioned sense of the word – a vast consolidation of all the lessons and discoveries of his art up to that point. Although the painting looked crude and impulsive, he actually planned each figure beforehand. The canvas was so large that Ensor painted it on an unstretched roll. He painted sections of the canvas at a time – keeping the rest of it rolled up against the wall. That is why parts of the painting look disjointed and contradictory. In 1989 – I saw this overwhelming work in The Getty Museum in L.A. - where it was fittingly the culmination of the museum’s collection of nineteenth century paintings. It was hard to recall my impressions but they were probably; fever, joy, bewilderment, awe, curiosity and empathy. It was a vast canvas teeming with incident, satire, venom and humanity - and I knew I did not understand an inch of it – but I loved it.

             

Also in 1888 - Ensor met and befriended Augusta Boogaerts - who was ten years younger and a barmaid in a local inn. He called her “the siren.” Very little is known about the extent of their relationship. Did they ever kiss? Did they ever have sex? Who knows? They never married and only saw each other irregularly. Maybe his mother disapproved – maybe Ensor prized his independence too much. However, they remained close until his death - she died the following year. In 1905 he painted a very tender but mysterious oil painting of the two of them called; Our Two Portraits. Both are dressed in dark clothes – though her hat is ringed with bright flowers. She sits at the centre of the painting seated in a chair - and holding a pink flower - as she looks out of a window to the left. Behind her in the mirror of a cabinet - we see Ensor - seated at a table looking over at her with fondness. It is as though they are completely together – yet respectful of each other’s solitude. As a statement of elderly love - it was wonderfully restrained and unsentimental.

             

By the turn of the 1890s Ensor’s social satire and rage at the stupidity of the world had brimmed over into biting cartoons and caricatures - some of which he went on to paint in oils on wooden panels – the most permanent of painting methods. He mocked; the doctors – who cured nothing, the judges even more vile than the criminals they sentenced, the politicians so deceptive and hypocritical they were like devils - and the artists and critics so blind and stupid they could not see his genius! Ensor’s satire followed and was influenced by - a long line of English caricaturists like William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray as well as the French genius of caricature - Honoré Daumier. The line in these paintings, etchings and drawings was spiky, brittle, fluttering and acidic – yet strangely beautiful. This tradition of biting satire continued in my day by comic book, artists like Robert Crumb. Of course, Ensor’s vision of the world was over the top. Like all great comics – the wanted to shake up people’s minds with ideas they may have had themselves – but never had the courage to admit.

             

Up until the early 1890s, Ensor was content to work alone in Ostend and without any real support. However, with the last exhibition of Les xx – he lost his one and only life-line to the public. Meanwhile his families’ disapproval, irritation, disappointment and anger had grown. His paintings rarely sold and he still lived off his mother’s earnings. His isolation deepened and so did his despair – culminating with his attempt to sell the entire contents of his studio for 8,500 francs. He had no takers. God only knows how desperate he felt after that.

             

After 1895, Ensor’s output slowed down. He had lost faith in himself and could no longer put up a fight. However, he began to have a growing following amongst poets, writers and intellectuals.

             

Then in 1899 – the tide really began to change. That year the Paris journal La Plume devoted an issue to him. He began to sell works on a regular basis to private collectors – and the world began to catch up with his visions. However, by then Ensor had become detached from his art. He watched his bizarre success like a spectator. Because his earlier work began to fetch higher and higher prices – he backdated his new paintings and plagiarized his own past achievements. However, he could still pull off a few last masterstrokes.

             

After caring for his mother for many years - Ensor was at her side when she died at the age of eighty in 1915. Before she died, he drew and painted a few heart-breaking portraits of his mother on her deathbed. I found them heartbreaking beautiful. In the foreground of his largish, The Artist’s Mother in Death (1915) – was a tray of beautiful bottles of medicine. You can almost hear Ensor pray that they work.

             

In 1903, he was made a Chevalier in the Belgian Order of Leopold – the first drop in what would become a shower of belated glory. In 1929, he was made a Baron and the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts organized a massive retrospective of his work. In 1931, a monument was erected to him near the Ostende Kursaal. In 1933 he was proclaimed the ‘Prince of Painters’ and in the same year he was awarded the Band of the Legion of Honour by France! Finally, before he died - an Association of Friends of Ensor was established - who after his death founded his museum in Ostend. Ensor apparently accepted all these awards with a wry smile.

            

 In 1942 – Belgian newspapers mistakenly pronounced Ensor dead. He did nothing to correct the misapprehension and even visited his own monument wearing a black arm-band! “I am mourning myself,” he told those he met. And you still wonder why I loved the man!

             

I doubted a day went by when Ensor did not think about death. Repeatedly he painted and drew himself as a skeleton. He spent his life like a hypochondriac nihilist - convinced the end of the world was nigh. He finally did die, after a three-week illness (quietly in his sleep), on 19th November 1949 - at the age of eighty-nine. By 2008, his art had long since become a source of inspiration to Expressionists, Surrealists, Outsiders and young artists concerned with identity.

             

His funeral was the last brilliant act in his theatre of comedy. However, this time he was not a lone actor crying in the streets – he was the focus of a national celebration of comic and visionary genius. All of the high and mighty of Belgium turned out for his funeral; Cabinet ministers, judges, generals, critics and the great and good of the art world – basically everyone he had poked fun at throughout his career. The bells tolled, high-flow speeches were made and flags fluttered in the wind. It was like a scene out of one of his paintings. It sounds like one of the funniest - yet most profound - funerals in history. I wished I had been there.