The Intrigue

When James Ensor enrolled in the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts at age seventeen, it didn’t take long for him to make an indelible impression.

As he explained: “The moment I arrived, a big problem appeared on the horizon. I was ordered to draw Octavius, the most august of the Caesars, from a white plaster bust. The snowy plaster horrified me. I reproduced it with vibrant pink chicken skin, reddening the hair and causing a great commotion among the students.”

Despite the furore, he was allowed to continue at the Academy, and even allowed to work with live models, though his tutors were aware this might result in even more of young Ensor’s blatant provocation. After three years he left the institution, calling the school an “establishment of the short-sighted.”

Ensor had been born in Ostend, Belgium in 1860 and showed an aptitude for painting at thirteen that led to his being trained by two established local watercolourists. But the young man was already a rascally maverick. He described his two tutors as ‘both pickled and oily, professorially initiated me to the disappointing commonplaces of their dreary, stillborn, and stubborn craft.”

Although he had clearly been thoroughly educated in traditional painting, he quickly moved forward in his own revolutionary direction, a direct critique of modern life.

He chose the metaphor of the Mardi Gras festivals, held annually throughout Belgium, for his caustic, often irreverent subject matter. Certainly he must have been influenced by the fact that his parents ran a shop specialising in the full gamut of carnival paraphernalia, from masks and costume to parade floats.

His works grew insistently more grotesquely cynical and mocking, as he tried to capture the fractures he saw beneath the surface of polite society. His alienation is highlighted in the viciously satirical Entrance of Christ into Brussels, a painting that caused apoplexy amongst critics and the public at the time. To this day, it retains the ability to startle viewers with its representation of a carnival mob engulfing Christ sitting on a donkey.

His use of formal structure to convey the chaotic scene is of little help in finding an easy interpretation of what is being depicted.

In the oddly-skewed perspective, the foreground is filled with unpleasantly-masked faces looming directly to confront the viewer. As the figures recede into the background, they form a ‘V’ shape, Ensor flattening them, ignoring careful renditions of perspective, to build the pressing intensity of the image.

You sense the crowd is tipped forward, suddenly ready to rush out and engulf you. It was his country’s struggle with economic and political oppression that Ensor wanted to convey in his sea of disorder and anarchy.

Ensor’s Christ faces a Belgian public instead of one in Jerusalem. The crowd is a mixture of bourgeoisie, clergy, and the military – basically the ruling class. But the masses he paints alongside them suggest Ensor’s desire to give those marginalised in society a presence, able to rise up against established authority.

Somewhat immodestly, Christ has been painted as a self-portrait of the artist, pointedly representing himself as a resolute martyr.

Ensor found clarity in this form of unaesthetic realism, despite it being viewed with disdain and horror. Throughout his career his representation of the ugly aspects of society share the avant-garde impulse towards all aspects of rebellion.

In fact, his work anticipated later movements from Fauvism to Surrealism, even onto Abstract Expressionism, with his juxtaposition of unmodulated dabs of pure colour and his primitively-simplistic technique of deconstruction.

However when Ensor exhibited his works in 1884, they were deplored by irate critics. “That is painting? No! It is garbage!” They were also termed “sickening studio rubbish” and “sinister idiocies.” Although disheartened by the reviews, Ensor continued to paint at a steady rate.

The demons and evil spirits that he portrayed, the festival of masked figures, the self-portraits as a skeleton, were certainly wry and aggressively dark, and would continue to be seen as scandalous throughout his career. To create such scenes, Ensor had set up his studio in the attic of his parents’ house, working there for 27 years.

Behind the masks, Ensor believed he was exposing the inner selves of his subjects, revealing their ‘true face’, in an illuminating social commentary.

However, the more Ensor was rejected, the more sharply he was critiqued, the more personal the abuse became, the more he persevered. Ensor’s deviant style caused him to become a target of ridicule in Ostend, and unpleasant rumours about him spread to the point that his family turned their back on him.

But over time, even to his own surprise, he grudgingly became more widely accepted, even respected. This new regard grew to the point that he was to be considered one of Belgium’s most prominent artists of early 20^th-century.

The painting here, The Intrigue, is a remarkable demonstration of Ensor’s powers, and his pioneering approach. Even though it is not widely known outside Belgium, the work has resonated with many artists who have made the pilgrimage to its home in the Museum of Fine Art in Antwerp, specifically to study this picture, and Ensor’s other works on display.

It is the singular masterpiece of the painter’s masquerade works. We see a woman who appears to have found herself, and hooked, a husband. The bouquet that she holds suggests that they are newly-wed, but a sinister-masked group surround the two.

One woman with a doll on her shoulders, not dissimilar to a dead child, points at the ‘groom’, as a skeleton figure looks on. It seems that the fate of the man is uncertain, and the entire scene, forcing itself into direct confrontation with the viewer, is a nervy and eerie one. This disturbing mood is further enhanced by the out-of-step, cheerily aggressive colour contrasts, and agitated brushwork. Today, his innovations, his career as an outsider, his railing against the strictures of academic art, have earned him totemic status as an artist of bewilderingly imaginative vision.