Word: ensor
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...1880s, some bomb went off in his brain. Ensor started experimenting with pencil drawing, teasing out a jittery, evaporating line that could dissolve form into boiling clouds of light. He applied it for a while to religious subjects weirdly poised between the sacred and the profane. Christ before an uncomprehending contemporary crowd was a favorite. That's also the subject of his most famous painting, Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889. A cartoonish cacophony of marching bands and lurid faces, it's a mob scene straight out of South Park. (Unfortunately it's not included in the MOMA show...
Early in the 1880s, when his paintings were being excluded from the official salons, Ensor co-founded an alliance of Belgian avant-gardists. Les Vingt - the Twenty - held an annual salon of its own that solicited work from foreign artists including Monet, Renoir and Whistler. In 1887, Georges Seurat contributed nothing less than A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, a tour de force of early modern art. Properly dazzled, a good number of the Twenty became converts to Seurat's pointillism. This was too much for Ensor. He had already dismissed the Impressionists. Who cared about capturing fugitive sunlight when...
...would that kind of art look like? In that same year, he provided one answer in Tribulations of Saint Anthony, a pandemonium crammed with the kind of scribble-scrawl images the world would not see again until Cy Twombly came along more than six decades later. Around this time, Ensor also started bringing his masks and skeletons out to play on a regular basis. From then on, personal and social relations in his work would be a dark comedy, performed in disguise and in party colors, with the Grim Reaper making regular entrances to rattle his bones in your face...
...Ensor drew lessons in form and color from Turner, Courbet and Manet, but the spirit of his work, the mad afflatus of his gift, owes more to the Germans. His devils are inherited from Bosch and Brueghel. His taste for the grotesque traces back to Grünewald. He, in turn, would hand on his caustic vision of humanity to the German Expressionists, younger artists like Emil Nolde and Ernst Kirchner who saw the possibilities in his combination of sour disposition and strident palette...
Chronically aggrieved, Ensor was the sort of man who didn't hesitate to draw himself as Christ crucified or, better, as a pickled herring being pulled apart by two art critics represented as skulls. Perhaps because he never expected his work to be accepted, he could pursue it to its furthest conclusions. But then - surprise - the honors started coming his way anyway. Museums began acquiring his art and offering him big shows. In 1929, Belgium's King Albert I even named him a baron, which makes you wonder if Albert had ever seen Ensor's etching of a king defecating...