There is a painting of a skate in this startling exhibition that amounts to nothing less than a portrait. It shows the voluminous fish sprawled flaccidly on a table. The ruffed white body spreads like fancy dress around the head, which is propped up so that the eyes are staring straight at the viewer. The fish wears a tragicomic expression, slightly humiliated, as if caught drinking too much. Or perhaps it had only just dined, before becoming dinner itself.
The Skate is very famous in Ensor’s native Belgium and pretty much the opposite here – and the same is true of the artist. James Ensor (1860-1949) was born in Ostend, the son of an English engineer; he had a British passport and spent time in London. But while we may think of him as the master of the masks – literally: he appears surrounded by them in one self-portrait – he is regarded as infinitely more various across the Channel, and so he now appears in this Royal Academy show.
Here is a frightening painting of a bathing hut, solitary and remote – number 164 all alone on the cold grey shore; what happened to the others? Here is Ensor’s mother on her deathbed in a most delicate and loving portrait, the nose taking prowess in the sinking face. Here are dark figures receding through the Ostend fog, and a spectacular painting of Adam and Eve fleeing an avenging angel in the form of a gigantic firework reaching out of the sky. Eden is low-lying Flanders.
Christ hangs on the cross surrounded by a crowd of Ostenders, not all of them duly solemn. A colossal storm of paint builds above the rooftops and high-tide flags of this port. Afternoon in Ostend is more like night, an arsenical green glow to this bourgeois interior in which two women take tea – one looking helplessly out at the painter, as if in hope of escape from this prison of disaffection and boredom.
What unites such disparate images is their peculiarly exuberant energy. Ensor is festive even when devastating or macabre. His drawing is lithe and precise, unfurling prolifically in vibrant space; his painting is celebrated for its gorgeous beauty, the brushmarks radiating across the canvas in lavish density. With the masks, his palette turns to exhilarating hues of pink, white, ochre, mint green and bright, seaside blue.
Ostend is for Ensor what Cookham was for Stanley Spencer: a real place, but also a microcosmic land of myth and parable. Ensor spent his entire life as a bachelor living above various shops in this seasonal resort. His mother sold souvenirs, carnival masks, dolls and chinoiserie; Ensor grew up in her curiosity shop, delighted by the “opulent colour, reflections and sparkling rays of light… an inextricable jumble of assorted objects constantly being knocked over by cats, and deafening parrots”.
Everything his mother sold he painted, jumbled to a purpose. His Ostend is crowded with walking dolls, masks and goggling Chinese ceramics, sometimes witnessing a great moment – the appearance of Christ – sometimes a great farce, as skeletons wage war over the corpse of a hanged man, or the fish in a grotesque banquet turn upon the diners, biting their greasy lips. These surrogate people are both actors and audience in Ensor’s show.
As a teenager he was taught by a caricaturist and a landscape painter, and his art often shows it – there are elegiac seascapes, and coruscating satire in his Seven Deadly Sins. Sloth shows the longest lie-in ever, with devils swinging on the clock hands above the sluggards and poking at their sleepy eyes while snails slime up the bedspread. In Gluttony, the next course is a head on a platter – the artist’s own.
Ensor had some right to his victim complex. His works were banned from exhibitions, he was repeatedly excluded from avant-garde groups, and the critics tortured him in print. Other than his father, who died of drink at 52, his family disliked his work, and some pictures were partly executed in household paint because he couldn’t afford oils. In 1893 he even tried to sell his room and its contents; there were no buyers.
Success – and there was eventually much of it, culminating in a title – came just around the time when his ideas were beginning to circle back on themselves in his late 40s.
But it is too easy to make a satirist of him, savagely guying his compatriots. The whole Halloween pageant of masks, devils and irate skeletons is not so simple. And this is what makes the RA’s show exemplary. Curated by Ensor’s fellow Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, it clears away the repetitions, allows more space for portraits and landscapes, and gives the sharpest sense of Ensor’s evergreen originality and his singular vision of the world from above the shop.
The masks are perverse – an unmasking, you might say. Is anything behind them? A masked old lady entering a room is astonished by a heap of masks on the floor (disgraceful untidiness, or a massacre of her fellow beings?). Two masks, one laughing heartily, the other weeping, are affably hugged by a skeleton wearing a parrot like a raffish feather hat – how short is the distance from happiness to grief, via death…
In The Intrigue, one of Ensor’s largest masterpieces, a throng of masks is seen sharing some hugger-mugger news with a mother whose baby is a doll. They appear clamorously energetic. The central figure is a man in an opera hat and evening dress – if one can call him a man: what he seems, more than anything, is a figure in a phantasmagoria staged by the artist, a drama of forceful personalities and riveting inventions; a theatre where the masks can live their own existence.
Many scholars (and practically all Belgians, according to the catalogue) have pondered the mystery of these masks. But Ensor himself was candid. The mask meant an opportunity for extravagant gesture, expression and decoration, but above all for “exquisite turbulence”.
Here is a paradox to carry in mind through this show, where the tone can be so hard to catch, falling far from obvious psychology. When the masks give way to skulls, for instance, it might seem as if Ensor was preoccupied by death. But skulls regularly turned up on the beach at Ostend (130,000 Flemish were massacred there in the 17th century), and they stand in for children, art critics, carnival-goers and – regularly – the artist himself. They’re almost anyone except the dead.
To find oneself burled up in life’s turbulence – single cells metastasising in unpredictable throngs – that is Ensor’s modern danse macabre. His predecessors may be Bosch and Goya, and perhaps Watteau in the eerie loneliness of certain pictures. But the sustained energy of his pen and brush, the graphic freedom of his theatrical scenarios is all his own. To be oneself when the onslaught is going the other way: that is his lifelong principle. In one of his many self-portraits, Ensor appears surrounded by evil spirits. He looks mildly perturbed, but not much frightened by this alien crowd. He is nothing like these figments. As in life, so in art: James Ensor doesn’t fit in.
