The Visionary James Ensor

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Cypher - The Panic Artist Website - www.thepanicartist.com - Open-
minded Over 18's Only!

I have over five hundred books on art in my home - I have had more -
but threw them out because I had no more room. My collection covers
everything from the cave painters to Luc Tuymans. For me the lives and
work of the masters is not only a framework for my art - but also a
road map for my life. I call many artists master - but only a handful
brother. One such man is the Flemish visionary painter James Ensor
(1860-1949).

His art and life has haunted my imagination for the last four years -
usually at my bleakest moments of despair - when I haven't 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 in the last few years the only story to
really give me any consolation - and make me smile if not laugh - has
been the strange life of Belgian's greatest artist of the twentieth
century (sorry Magritte).

I first discovered his work when it was featured in a documentary on
BBC 2 in the mid 1980's. 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 think it is an
unforgivable sin to write about art one has largely never seen in the
flesh. But in his case I have 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 traveled 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; Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Munch - Ensor
struggled for decades to find a sympathetic audience. Perhaps their
stories of rejection has been slightly overdone by romantic
biographers in the 1950's - Van Gogh for example was just beginning to
achieve some recognition when he killed himself. Certainly Ensor's
story of artistic neglect has 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, hypersensitive, neurotic and died unmarried and childless. He was
rumored to have an imitation mermaid in his studio made off fish-
scales, monkeys 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 depicted; landscapes,
seascapes, streets scenes, crowds of goggle-eyed people, portraits,
interiors, still-lives, self-portraits, caricatures, masks and
skeletons. His drawing 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 merely 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 can appear to the conservative art lover;
crude, ugly, creepy and mad. However the closer you look at his
fantastic and visionary paintings - the more skilled, beautiful and
prophetic they become.

James Ensor was born on April 13th 1860, in Ostend a sea side 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 traveled 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 robe and pig-
tail - who was passing through Ostend. She had a girl with him but
then was 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. His parents took him out of
school and left him free to day-dream, roam the beach and take up
drawing. His father recognizing his sons 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."

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.

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 has the ethereal softness of a watercolour. On
second sight it seems a humdrum scene. However by the third look - you
are hooked! He painted this small canvas at the age of seventeen - and
he was already a master. He shows himself at sixteen - to already be
able to create a magical and uncanny version of reality on canvas. It
as though he can actually paint the air. You feel 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!

At seventeen he was 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."

While in Brussels he met and befriend 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 redicule.

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 home town again.

He converted the fourth-floor attic of his parents 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 find haunting. Has anyone ever painted
curtains with such tenderness - as flimsy barriers to a harsh external
world of frightening people.

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 roll of a surgeon - removing the 'stone of
madness' from Ensor's head! Later Ensor would use these and other
photo-graphs as stimulation for his paintings. As a young man Ensor
like to play his flute at parties, jeer at hunchbacks in the street -
or mock the stall-holders at the fish market. You could say he loved
causing mischief - and I think that is 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
Mr Deaths-Head.

Ensor's attic studio had a fine view of the streets' of Ostend outside
- which he would paint over and over - 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 Stormtroopers 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 has its own peculiar identity -
depicting different kinds of personalities, vices or stations in
society. In fact it almost appears as though the masks were coming to
life. When I was younger I was somewhat skeptical of Ensor's masks and
skeletons. I worried that it might be a bit contrived. But Ensor lived
from birth with these strange objects. He played with them. He
befriended them. So it was utterly natural form him to paint them.

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

By the mid 1880's 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 or drawings. Those nudes that there are
- tend to be comical or threatening (in one drawing of a big breasted
woman he drew comical faces over the nipples). In fact I wonder if he
thought of sex much at all - I know 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 is stamped with his DNA. He
painted what he wanted - when he wanted. Art was his solitary
amusement. He delighted confusing and playing with his audience and
himself. This is 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.

Ever great painter has his or her own idiosyncratic pallet. Ensor's
brittle whites, steely blues, fire-engine reds, emerald greens and sad
violets - are totally his own. His greatest paintings seem to radiate
light - which miraculously appears 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 -
who's 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 he was steeped
in Brueghel the Elder and Bosch.

In 1883 Octave Maus created the circle 'Les xx" (The Twenty) an avant-
garde goup - which welcomed the work of radical and unpopular
painters, writers and musicians from all over Europe. It was at one
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 have no doubt that if
he was alive today - he would be 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 is hard to see Christ - as he rides on a donkey in the
background of the canvas. For ones attention is first grabbed by the
army band and Mardi Gras revelers - that throng the foreground. To the
lower left a couple French-kiss and seem oblivious of Christ's
presence. The largest red banner in the parade reads; "Vive La
Sociale" (Long Live Social Progress). Ensor has 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 deicted himself as the devil -
demonic and sly.

He had previously drawn blasphemous images like Ensor/Christ in the
temple - expelling the money lenders - or even of himself as Christ
crucified on the cross. There are no easy answers in Ensor's art -
'good' people have a secret, dark-side - and 'bad' people are touched
by the divine.

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
looks crude and impulsive he actually planned each figure beforehand.
The canvas was so large that Ensor painted it on an unstreched roll.
He painted sections of the canvas at a time - keeping the rest of it
rolled up against the wall. In 1989 - I saw this overwhelming work in
The Getty Museum in L.A. - where it was fittingly the culmination of
the museums collection of nineteenth century paintings. It is hard now
to recall my impressions but they were probably; fever, joy,
bewilderment, awe, curiosity and empathy. It is a vast canvas teeming
with incident, satire, venom and humanity - and I knew I didn't
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. But 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 is wonderfully restrained and unsentimental.

By the turn of the 1890's 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 - Honore Daumier. The line in these
paintings, etchings and drawings is spiky, brittle, fluttering and
acidic - yet strangely beautiful. This tradition of biting satire is
continued today 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 peoples minds with ideas they may have had
themselves - but never had the courage to admit.

Up until the early 1890's Ensor was fairly 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 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 back-dated
his new paintings and plagiarized his own past achievements. But 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 find them heartbreaking beautiful. In the foreground of
The Artist's Mother in Death (1915) - is a tray of beautiful bottles
of medicine. You 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 receted 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 - a Association of Friends
of Ensor was established who after his death founded his museum in
Ostend. Ensor apparently accepted all these awards with a rye 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! And you still wonder why I love the
man!

I doubt a day went by when Ensor did not think about death. 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.

His funeral was the last brilliant act in his theater 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 minsters, 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 speech's 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 wish I had been there.

Cypher - The Panic Artist Website - www.thepanicartist.com - Open-
minded Over 18's Only!