Art: Belgian Misanthrope

In his middle age, a Belgian painter named James Ensor once complained that he was “infected with respectability.” It bothered him, he said, that well-bred young ladies who used to turn their backs on him “now smile at me with all their teeth.” But if Ensor became respectable, it was the age that had changed, not Ensor. He kept on painting some of the most ghoulishly disagreeable canvases of modern times—and heard himself hailed as Belgium’s greatest 20th-century artist. Last week, two years after his death at 89, Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art put on a retrospective show of his work.

Actually, there were two Ensors—the young man who painted some mild early pieces of impressionism, and the mature craftsman of disagreeableness. The Museum of Modern Art arranged its exhibit so that visitors would see the mild stuff first. But the early Ensors, e.g., pleasant home-town scenes such as Ostend Rooftops and Afternoon at Ostend, quickly gave place to the later ones: the swirling Tribulations of St. Anthony, a skeleton-haunted Banquet of the Starved, a macabre dumb-show entitled Masks Confronting Death. His most famous picture, Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 (TIME, May 15,1950), was there too. It portrayed Christ as a tiny figure at the top of a pyramid of grinning masks, so shocked Ensor’s contemporaries that it was not displayed in public until 1929, 41 years after it was painted. It was still unpleasant.

Ensor’s story is the story of an artist rebuffed who turned misanthrope. “All rules, all canons of art,” he said in his mature misanthropy, “vomit death.” He dressed his subjects in leering masks, pitted them in futile struggles against each other. Even his own family was not proof against his scorn. In The Artist’s Mother in Death, he stretched his mother’s gaunt, grey-faced corpse ironically alongside a menacing array of medicine bottles. Although he never left Belgium, Ensor’s pictures helped set off detonations all over Europe. “I indicated all the modern experiments,” he boasted. “When I look at my drawings of 1877 I find cubist angles, futurist explosions, impressionist flakings, dada knights and constructivist structures.” Some Ensor followers: Swiss Paul Klee, Russian Marc Chagall, Belgian Paul Delvaux.

The respectability Ensor professed to fear finally overtook him, and he yielded without a struggle. In 1929 King Albert made him a baron. Before his death in 1949, he saw his paintings hung in most of Belgium’s museums. In Ostend, a tablet was placed on the wall of his house, a street was named for him, and a statue was erected. Artist Ensor unveiled the statue himself.