Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
James Ensor
Belgian; 19th-century
Bruges, Belgium: Groeninge Museum
79%
Icône. Portrait of Eugène Demolder. 1893. Oil, pencil and gouache on panel
The problem with much of Ensor's work is that, by dint of chronology and proximity, it's forced to compete with post-impressionism, and yet it doesn't doesn't possess nearly the same sensitivity for the interpenetration of volumes and the surfaces that contain them, or for the totality of relations within the image, or for the tension between depicted space and the flat thing it's set behind. And so a little spindly line-drawn and very flippant thing like this, which doesn't try to hide its nature as an illustration and which not only bucks but actively negates the necessity of articulating a spatial program, manages to stake a claim for its value somewhere just outside of convention. It has a bespoke relationship with art's history, which is expressed not just iconographically through the Madonna and the mandorlas, but also formally through its refusal of illusionistic depth in the top and bottom panels (in turn this debases the perfunctory illusionism of the middle segment). (TFS, 2026)
Ghent, Belgium: Museum voor Schone Kunsten
79%
Pierrot and Skeleton in a Yellow Robe. 1893. Oil on panel
An important aspect of Ensor's quality is on display in this painting: his acumen as an illustrator and his roughshod treatment of the surface — two key elements of his style — basically refuse to interact with each other. His linework is jolly, almost blithe. It goes about delimiting volumes with little regard for the material qualities which his handling imparts to them, and then those qualities (rather sinister) seem to distribute themselves more or less evenly across the canvas, neither stopping nor starting at any drawn boundaries. Of course, the two obscure figures that croak out of the background's miasma are an exception, which makes them the painting's crux. They're neither rendered nor materialized, but drawn from some unctuous in-between. The benefit of this is that it makes good on what is typically, in Ensor's painting, merely intrigue and prettiness; the downside is that these figures draw their effect from the whole of the painting, without seeming to affect that whole in turn. (TFS, 2026)
Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts
77%
Old Lady with Masks. 1889. Oil on canvas
Ensor's good for his summery high tones that conflict with the depravity of what he paints, and for his unmixed colors sitting atop or butting up against each other with such ugliness, and for the vague impasto he deploys to make his surfaces more wretched, and of course for his intervention into the Boschian Flemish tradition of the grotesque, ambivalent absurd. It speaks to a weakness in Ensor's art that his better pictures, like this one, tend to depict no or very little actual space; it's evident that he relies too much on brash sentiment for his effects, but what's less clear (though no less damaging) is his proximity to a certain designishness. In this picture, it's as if he's subtracted from Bosch all the weird dimensionality that emerges from the interactions, active and passive, between so many figures at devilish work and play. What's left is a tightly interlocking structure of disconnected visual elements, a carapace of characters. Ensor makes good on this through all the means I described above, the function of which is to imply spatial complexity where there isn't any by stoking tension between the surface and the image. (In this way he's not too far off from another Fleming, Rubens.) (TFS, 2026)
Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts
71%
Astonishment of the Mask Wouse. 1889. Oil on canvas
The green tapestry on the back wall is like the anti-Klimt — helping to situate the painting's many decorative elements inside of a spatial order to which they're not quite reducible, rather than building a sense of surround out of some primary, preexistent decorative scheme. Like his predecessors Breugel and Bosch, Ensor is easily likeable for his weirdness but the quality of his art lies elsewhere, namely in the way his wacky forms seem to articulate themselves clearly as forms in spite of his messy handling. Clarity serves Ensor's allegorical intentions, of course, but also the disconnect between this structural clarity and the muddle of his paint goes a step beyond merely delivering allegorical meaning, managing to objectivize it and thereby to legitimate it aesthetically. Breugel and Bosch do this too, of course, but their resulting pictorial programs were developed with a greater sense of coherence — their paintings contend with less contradiction — than Ensor's: that tapestry, for instance, demands to be taken seriously not just as a depiction but as a surface, but the by-turns cramped and empty arrangement can't sustain the tension of that two-fold demand. (TFS, 2026)