Very Nasty Great Art

norbert lynton

James Ensor ± Christ'sEntry into Brussels in1889patricia g berman

The J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 2002 £14.00$17.95 (p)114 pp. 37 col/49 mono illusisbn 0-89236-641-9 (p)

The Getty Museum acquired Ensor'smasterpiece in 1987. It had longbeen hovering in and out of sight,

privately owned and periodically lent topublic collections but rarely allowed totravel to the exhibitions that could havelodged it securely as part of art history.Many books refer to it. Patricia Berman'snotes and bibliography, in this modest-looking but intellectually very solid paper-back, draw the reader's attention to a hostof publications on and around Ensor andthe Belgian socio-political context of histime. Anyone not at home in all this isadvised to read Berman with care and ±ideally ± proceed to Los Angeles forthwithto stand in front of the real thing. I did seeit, many years ago, and recall well both theshock it gave me and the admiration thatquickly ensued. It is very nasty great art.Berman's account of the work and itscomplex genesis adds significantly to ourunderstanding of it.

For once, the word `masterpiece' (in itsmodern meaning) is apt. This largecanvas, 8.5 by 14 feet, is a key work inthe history of modern painting. Painted in1888, it is contemporary with other worksof art announcing the birth of modernism,most obviously Gauguin's Vision after theSermon and Van Gogh's best Arlespaintings. Several Ensor drawings dealingwith nominally religious subjects can beseen as preparations for it, including aCalvary scene of 1886 in which the nakedprotagonist hangs from a cross labelled`Ensor'. In 1883, he had begun to turn hisdomestic paintings, suave arrangementsof naturalistic light and colour, which hadbrought the young Ostend painter to thenotice of Brussels, into macabre en-counters between ghoulishly maskedcreatures. The fact that his parents' shopstocked masks, some of which were

bought for the annual carnival proces-sions, cannot explain why, in Ensor's art,together with sharp caricatures of oftennameable contemporaries, they replacethe idealised human race to which seriousart was still expected to devote itself,especially in paintings of an epic size.Executed in a studio barely large enough toaccommodate it, The Entry is a little tallerand much wider than Matisse's Dance androughly twice the size of the Demoisellesd'Avignon. It was obviously intended to be amasterpiece confronting `a decade ofunprecedented political instability inBelgium'.

It was also a proclamation against justabout everything except art's duty toproclaim and the artist's role as leader.In so far as it claimed to picture an event inthe life of Christ, it is the Christ of Straussand Renan we meet here, the historicalman, not the Son of God. The crowdcoming towards us, in front of Christ onhis ass, is composed of all sorts of mon-strosities, some masked, others just uglyspecimens, some of them nameable,followed by a rows of civic guards forminga brass band, led by a grossly moustachedand bemedalled officer. It is the smallerfigures we see beyond Christ in theprocession who, masked and costumed,seem to represent the ordinary people ofBrussels, enjoying their annual day of anti-authoritarian craziness. They alone arehaving fun. For the rest, the paintinglampoons established religion, politicalplatitudes including those of the left, andeven the Brussels art group, Les Vingt orLes XX, which Ensor had helped to foundin 1883, when he was twenty-three. Fiveyears later, once the society's mostpromising youngster, Ensor had becomea thorn in its side.

Like Courbet, Ensor was using historypainting's monumental form for a subjectthat was primarily genre and even scato-logical in places, in spite of the Biblicaltheme. In any case, can a Biblical event bemoved not only into the contemporaryworld (as in medieval and Renaissance art)but into the future? Berman illustrates anddiscusses a popular Brussels Salon paint-ing of 1880 ± Verhas' The Review of theSchoolchildren in 1878. Much the same size

as Ensor's, it shows, with all thenaturalism and sweetness academicmethods could muster, thousands ofchildren, led by a phalanx of pretty littlegirls in white and gold, parading towardsus down one of Brussels' boulevards. Theypass the king and queen celebrating notonly their golden wedding anniversary,but also the wished-for unity of Belgium'sFrench and Flemish peoples under thecrown. Verhas' composition speaks oforder and optimism for the future. `It isthe twentieth century that passes by!', onecommentator exclaimed, seeing in it thepromise of a fine, bourgeois age. Ensor'sstatement was the opposite: his boulevardserves as an urban Narrenschiff. Both paint-ings attach themselves to the tradition ofthe `joyous entry' staged by cities to receivea great ruler, but Ensor subverts itruthlessly by drawing on his memories ofcarnivals and a range of art includingCruikshank, Brueghel, Bosch and Rem-brandt, as well as on his own paintingsand drawings around the same theme,satirising some of the same individualsand types.

The Getty Museum's conservators haveanalysed the process and means by whichthe painting came to be: elaborate under-drawing and careful application of paint inaccord with it, thick and thin. Ensorrelates how he sat on the floor to do thelower parts, under a leaking roof. Bermansuggests that the successive positions theartist must have adopted in executing hislarge work may have led to the shiftingpoints of view it incorporates, but thisdoes not explain how this would squareeither with his use of detailed under-drawing, or with Ensor's later claims ofworking out of `an almost primal spon-taneity'. He also claimed to have usedcommon house paints in preference toartists' colours, but the conservatorsfound only the standard artists' paints.Ensor used them very directly, rarelymixing them. That may have been acounter to Seurat's pointillism as seen inA Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the GrandeJatte, shown by Les XX in 1887 and receivedwith an enthusiasm that maddened him.`All rules, all canons of art, vomit death',he said; moreover, the serenity of Seurat's

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scene contradicted Ensor's dystopic viewof modern city life. There's a lot ofvomiting in it.

Ensor's use of paint ± not just what buthow ± invites more attention than Berman,with all her thoroughness, allows it. Shespeaks of the `dazzling virtuosity' of hisbrushwork, and of his essentially tradi-tional methods in creating this `chaoticand unconventional' image. Perhaps moremight have been said of the crazy origin-ality of fashioning a religious historypainting in terms of caricature. For theidiom itself there was plenty of precedent,not least in Cruikshank, but to use it forsuch a major painting? By going back toBosch and Brueghel, Ensor was unravel-ling the Renaissance as well as assertingthe North against the South. Moreover, inusing his brush in such a brutal manner hewas surely demonstrating not virtuositybut hatred of virtuosity, whether Seurat'sand or that of the Belgian Decadentsaround him. He disdained Khnopff'svapid visions. Has brushwork ever beencruder? Have colour contrasts ever beenmore abrupt? Ensor knew he would`offend the public', with his repulsivefaces and masks and his claustrophobicchoreography. A greater contrast withVerhas' dainty naturalism or Seurat'sstillness could not be imagined. He wouldalso offend his own circle, Les XX: it isfrom their balcony, clearly marked withthe double X, that vomit and excrementdescend most liberally. The painting's titledenotes it an un-history painting in 1888when Ensor painted most of it. He meantto exhibit it in 1889, when it would havebeen a very contemporary history-typevision. It was not hung, and Berman leavesit open whether the picture was not quiteready or whether his associates refused toshow it, or even whether, by that time, hehad made it an anti-Les XX statement.

In the event, it was not exhibited publiclyfor four decades. What if it had been shownin Cologne's great Sonderbund Exhibitionof 1912, in which Van Gogh and Munchwere so prominent, and Kirchner andHeckel appeared mainly as painters of aMadonna and decorative forms on the wallsand ceiling of the chapel? It stayed inOstend, on the wall over Ensor's har-monium, and there Nolde saw it in 1911,just before embarking on the Life of Christpolyptych in 1911±12, for which he adoptedEnsor's unprecedented brashness in place

of a more broken,modulated sub-Im-pressionist manner.In his autobiography,Nolde does not men-tion calling on Ensor,only that he visitedthe Brussels Museumto look at Ensor'setchings and foundnone. In 1911 hebegan paintinggroups of masks asstill lifes, and one ofthese pictures wasshown in the Son-derbund: three Euro-pean masks and oneexotic one. A WestAfrican mask makesa surprise appear-ance among all theWestern masks andcaricatures in En-sor's painting, pre-sumably the firstinstance of such anappropriation inmodern art. (Bermanstates that Kandinskyvisited Ensor in 1917;that seems unlikely.)

It is rare that a work of art, created todestroy or at least mock the great networkto which every artist contributes, also tugsat so many threads in it. Ensor is not likelyto have known Alexander Ivanov's master-piece, Christ's Appearance to the People,painted in Rome over many years andbrought home to Russia in 1858. It isalmost four times the size of the Ensor,and was painted with all the academicskills St Petersburg and Rome coulddevelop in this ambitious painter. Thetsar in the end bought it, some hours afterIvanov's death the same year. The twopictures, one seen by some as a great, lateflowering of the tradition of Raphael, byothers, notably by Punin in the 1910s, asthe `first modern painting', have much incommon. Ivanov's Christ appears alone,in the middle distance, coming to bebaptised. St John the Baptist is Ivanov'sprotagonist, the painter identifying withhim just as Ensor identified with hisChrist. Both artists loaded their pictureswith socio-political as well as religiousmessages, Ivanov to reawaken the world to

faith and piety, Ensor to attack allauthority. Ensor lived on, long enough totone his rhetoric down by altering thewording on some of his banners andplacards. In marrying the traditionalformula to the subversive tradition of thecarnival, he had turned the `joyous entry'into a bitter parody. Ivanov's painting ismodern only because of its missionaryzeal, reminding the Russians of their self-appointed historical role in the world.Ensor's can be seen as the first modernpainting in terms of its headlong anta-gonisms, stylistic and social, but so richand deep is it in its satirical references,surveyed by Berman, that one wonderswhether it is not also the first post-modernist painting. Perhaps, though, thepassion behind its buffoonery disqualifiesit from that.

norbert lyntonEmeritus Professor of Art History,

University of Sussex

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