Stay in the Loop
BSR publishes on a weekly schedule, with an email newsletter every Wednesday and Thursday morning. There’s no paywall, and subscribing is always free.
A satirist's angry laughter
James Ensor at Museum of Modern Art (1st review)
This is the last full week that the James Ensor exhibition will be on display at the Museum of Modern Art, so I finally roused myself to go up to New York to see it. I'm very glad that I did.
Ensor (1860-1949) is one of those European artists who are regularly included in anthologies of artwork from the Symbolist period, but he's ill served by our familiarity with him. We are so accustomed to "Ensor, the guy who painted all those mask- and skeleton-paintings," that we really don't know him at all.
(In this regard Ensor's case is very similar to that of the composer Erik Satie: Our very familiarity with the Gymnopedies— the groundwork piece for today's ambient music— prevents us from recognizing or appreciating Satie as the composer of the eccentric 1893 keyboard work, Vexations.)
Seeing Ensor "in bulk"— and this exhibition includes over a hundred of his paintings, drawing and prints— causes you to see Ensor for the first time. Ensor is as much a Symbolist as Paul Delville or Gustav Klimt, but he represents the aroused and angry side of Symbolism. Anti-church, anti-state, anti-bourgeois society (to which he himself belonged), Ensor emerges as a satirist par excellence with an especially venomous regard for those "bad doctors" and "dangerous cooks" (i.e., conservative critics) who held his work and that of his colleagues in very low esteem.
He's not the first artist to suggest that the re-appearance of Christ on contemporary streets would lead to a new crucifixion, but Ensor's Entry of Christ into Brussels is certainly one of the more elaborate statements of the case, while his portrait, The Man of Sorrows, is so contorted as to suggest a Japanese print of some Kabuki actor.
In fact, the exhibit makes the point that Ensor is as much a forerunner of Expressionism as he is a Symbolist. Certainly his print of a ghostly scythe-wielding Angel of Death flying over a plague-stricken city wouldn't appear out of place in a catalogue of works by Otto Dix or Alfred Kubin.
Considering how rarely Ensor even makes it across the ocean, and considering the size and inclusiveness of this show, I would say that it's an exhibition not be missed by lovers of either Symbolism or Expressionist work— but you'd better hurry, because the clock is ticking.♦
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read a response, click here.
Ensor (1860-1949) is one of those European artists who are regularly included in anthologies of artwork from the Symbolist period, but he's ill served by our familiarity with him. We are so accustomed to "Ensor, the guy who painted all those mask- and skeleton-paintings," that we really don't know him at all.
(In this regard Ensor's case is very similar to that of the composer Erik Satie: Our very familiarity with the Gymnopedies— the groundwork piece for today's ambient music— prevents us from recognizing or appreciating Satie as the composer of the eccentric 1893 keyboard work, Vexations.)
Seeing Ensor "in bulk"— and this exhibition includes over a hundred of his paintings, drawing and prints— causes you to see Ensor for the first time. Ensor is as much a Symbolist as Paul Delville or Gustav Klimt, but he represents the aroused and angry side of Symbolism. Anti-church, anti-state, anti-bourgeois society (to which he himself belonged), Ensor emerges as a satirist par excellence with an especially venomous regard for those "bad doctors" and "dangerous cooks" (i.e., conservative critics) who held his work and that of his colleagues in very low esteem.
He's not the first artist to suggest that the re-appearance of Christ on contemporary streets would lead to a new crucifixion, but Ensor's Entry of Christ into Brussels is certainly one of the more elaborate statements of the case, while his portrait, The Man of Sorrows, is so contorted as to suggest a Japanese print of some Kabuki actor.
In fact, the exhibit makes the point that Ensor is as much a forerunner of Expressionism as he is a Symbolist. Certainly his print of a ghostly scythe-wielding Angel of Death flying over a plague-stricken city wouldn't appear out of place in a catalogue of works by Otto Dix or Alfred Kubin.
Considering how rarely Ensor even makes it across the ocean, and considering the size and inclusiveness of this show, I would say that it's an exhibition not be missed by lovers of either Symbolism or Expressionist work— but you'd better hurry, because the clock is ticking.♦
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read a response, click here.
What, When, Where
“James Ensor.†Through September 21, 2009 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd St., New York. (212) 708-9400 or
www.moma.org.
Sign up for our newsletter
All of the week's new articles, all in one place. Sign up for the free weekly BSR newsletters, and don't miss a conversation.
