Art: Grim Reaper

“Reason,” said the Belgian painter James Ensor, “is the enemy of art. Artists dominated by reason lose all feeling.” Ensor himself never ran the risk: in the 89 years he lived, he gave to the world a strange and eerie legacy that sometimes seemed to be the work of a madman. But though he shocked his contemporaries, he ranks today as the greatest Belgian painter of modern times. This week a good sampling of his work went on display at Manhattan’s World House Galleries, and a handsome new book, James Ensor, by Paul Haesaerts (Abrams; $17.50), was on sale in the bookstores.

Except for a few excursions into Brussels, he mostly spent his life in the seaport of Ostend, where he was born in 1860. His father, raised in England and Belgium, and Belgian mother indulged him shamelessly. He lasted exactly two years in school, lived in a world of fairy tales, nightmares, the fascinating clutter of his parents’ curio shop and an attic that was “full of horrible spiders, shells, old clothing the color of rust and blood, red and white corals, monkeys, turtles, dried mermaids and stuffed Chinamen.”

Garbage! At Brussels’ Royal Academy of Fine Arts, his salon-painting professors dismissed him as “an ignorant dreamer.” He grew into a moody recluse, so pale and thin that some of his neighbors called him the Grim Reaper. His silences seemed endless, but his sudden outbursts could be terrifying. His work began to veer from his first subdued “middleclass interiors” and his early brilliant portraits into a macabre art that was like nothing else being done.

He had experimented with everything from impressionism to symbolism, but he could not abide artists who fastened themselves to one school and then repeated themselves until death. “All rules, all canons of art belch death,” he said, and even the famous art circle he helped found in Brussels—Les XX, the most avant-garde bunch of its day—was sometimes too shattered by his paintings to exhibit them. As for the critics, they were perpetually outraged. “Mere daubings!” complained the Gazette. “Come, come,” cried Le Patriot, “it’s garbage!”

Masked Folly. Neither king nor beggar was safe from his brush. “My favorite occupation,” he said, “is to make others famous, to uglify them, to enrich their ugliness.” He painted a world of fiends and skeletons, of ghoulish clowns and grinning, beak-nosed humans at their most frighteningly ridiculous. He became obsessed by carnival masks, used them, not to disguise mankind, but to highlight its folly. His famous The Entry of Christ into Brussels—with himself as Christ—is Ensor at his most devastating. Here, surrounding Christ, is a seething horde of pomposity—soldiers, millionaires, judges, art critics—in a word, the Enemy.

But as is so often the case when an enfant terrible lives long enough to become a Grand Old Man, Ensor’s great talent was finally recognized. He was not only made a baron; he was treated as a kind of national institution. “Here,” he said as the honors and eulogies poured in on him, “is an old man grown grey in harness, bent under the yoke of exaggerated tributes.” For a man who walked so lonely a path (“Let us resist communion with the mob! To be artists, let us live in hiding!”), his end was pure irony. At his funeral in 1949, bands played, flags waved, and the Enemy descended upon Ostend in force—Cabinet ministers in full dress, ambassadors, bishops, generals, magistrates, and of course the critics. It was a funeral fit for Ensor’s brush.