Word: ensor
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First Period--1, NH, Allwood (Siddall, Robbins) 4:09;2, H, Trotman (Lind, Sasner) 4:58;3, NH, Hunt (Manning, Ferry) 5:45;4, NH, Siddall (Allwood) 12:31;5, NH, Siddall (Ensor) 15:45. Penalties--NH, Difmann (slashing...
...James Ensor, and in the paintings he made in the last two decades of the 19th century, the characters and props of the demonic tradition take their final curtain call: the persecuted Christ, the scrawny monsters, the whole malevolent apparatus of hooks and claws, skeletons and distended orifices, grimacing masks and threatening crowds that had served European artists so well up to the death of Goya. The Guggenheim Museum's current retrospective of Ensor, more than 110 pieces, tries to present him as a modern artist, which he was not. Ensor's was a solo...
...Ensor's career was not just provincial; it was provinciality itself. He was born in Ostend, the Belgian seaport and watering place, in 1860. His parents ran a little junk shop (it also sold masks for the yearly Ostend Carnival), and Ensor's childhood was obsessed by "our dark and frightening attic, full of horrible spiders, curios, seashells, plants and animals from distant seas, beautiful chinaware, rust and blood-colored effects, red and white coral, monkeys, turtles, dried mermaids and stuffed Chinamen." Between the immense stolidity of its bourgeois life and the thinness of its cultural milieu, Ostend...
Sweetness of Touch. Light, considered as a sign of divine immanence, fascinated Ensor. It gives a special tension to his skeleton pieces, mask paintings and the street scenes of his best years, from about 1885 to 1900: glitter and death, dark subjects and brisk high tones. The brutally emphatic imagery was created with a disconcerting sweetness of touch. Skeleton Painter in His Atelier, 1896, typifies this: the surface is almost as pretty as a Bonnard (though not nearly so well painted), and the very fact that Ensor was not trying to use illusionist tricks to convince viewers of the skeleton...
...when trying to impart lessons, what a poseur Ensor was! Every Christ he painted is trivialized by his narcissistic equation of the suffering God and the rejected artist. It is customary, at least in Belgium, to see Ensor as a man of the people. But Ensor's waterfront lumpenproletariat look just as subhuman as his judges and police officers. As a political artist, he was both strident and unfocused. The Good Judges, 1891, is a curdled parody of Daumier, without the master's swift economy of feeling. It is impossible to tell what Ensor thought about politics, except...