Death is back with its grotesque disciples. Shining white and grinning with the extinguished candle in his hand, he is the only one bareheaded between grimaces with a carnival-like headdress and dead eyes that love him to eat, he’s back in the Kunsthalle Mannheim. But only for a visit. Because James Ensor’s key work “Death and the Masks” from 1897 was reviled in 1937 and turned into money. The degenerate people of German fascism found the famous picture, which had belonged to the museum since 1927, to be “degenerate” and sold it to Liège via Swiss art dealers.
From there it is now back in Mannheim for a few weeks in the center of the great James Ensor retrospective – with 60 paintings and 120 graphics the first comprehensive show in Germany since the exhibition in the Frankfurt Schirn in 2006. Here death shines happily again Cheekiness, the eternally grinning companion of James Ensor’s art. As a vicious critic of the satiated and complacent of the Belle Époque (albeit mostly with holey rows of teeth), death here leads the regime over the crowd of the wrong: the masks that Ensor felt as the true appearance of his time.
The lifelong rooted in Ostend, who painted his best pictures in the attic of his parents’ house in the two decades before the turn of the century – rejected and ridiculed by art critics and salons – left no doubt: “Behind the masks there is violence and glamor. ” This ambivalence of the hidden, which he illustrated in his many heretical picture narratives, is responsible for the fact that his work has survived all art fashions and changes unscathed.
A hundred bizarre masks from Germany provided Ensor with the templates for his figures
Ensor, who only received recognition for his work and a title of nobility from the king when his bizarre ingenuity ran out, was well aware of the symbolic explosive power of his motifs. “I have distorted the absurd dude forever”, he wrote in a Dadaist-sounding poem about the citizens and officers, the “fat-faced professors” and “all-powerful masters” who represented the Belgian kingdom in the then fashionable seaside resort, the absurd theater of lying Bourgeoisie. The black eyes in their deformed grimaces show the color of empty eye slits that arise when a mask is removed.
After Ensor returned to Ostend in 1880 from the Academy in Brussels, which he described as a “box for nearsighted people” because of its dead art rituals, he acquired around 100 bizarre masks from Germany, which from then on formed the models for his main actors. Squeezed into groups up to hidden objects, or as actors in puzzling quarrels, these masked creatures give Ensor’s Bildtheater a sharp note of the mean – or even the satirical for those who do not feel they are meant. The masks stir up rumors in the “intrigue”, the skeletons are in a bitter argument with lance and broom over the hanged painter, who dangles from the ceiling with the sign “Ragout” around his neck. They gather under an angel of death as deadly sins, or act coquettishly, freezing or confused about the real life in the dead.
Wildly gesticulating and childishly armed, these ghosts and dead show not only the explosive emotional muddle of a society that murdered or mutilated ten million people during Ensor’s lifetime in the Congo, the crown colony of Leopold II. The random amusement that Ensor also represented with these figures is probably meant by the “shine” that is hidden behind masks: the inhibited longing for the liberation of feelings and lusts that were tied up in the false etiquette of decency. And from which James Ensor himself could have suffered, who remained in platonic relationships with women all his life because his family did not consider them befitting or they were already married.
People pose, kiss, copulate and gape on the beach in Ostend
However, this most important complex in Ensor’s oeuvre, the death and mask dances, only fills one hall in the Mannheim show. The exhibition is devoted to otherwise less prominent aspects of the work such as the still lifes, the landscape paintings, the ballet “Die Liebestonleiter” composed by Ensor and performed as a pantomime, and graphics. Here, too, the rebellious moment is formative almost everywhere, for example in the caricatures or in the hidden object of the rich bathing fun on the flat sandy beach of Ostend, where people mainly pose, kiss, copulate and gape, between all genders and animals without inhibition.
But Ensor’s preoccupation with Christianity is likely to be central to his drawings and graphics. While he saw Jesus as an alter ego who competes against a hostile society – for example in his most famous painting “The Entry of Christ in Brussels” from 1889, which can only be shown in preliminary studies in Mannheim – the further portrayal of Christianity was deliberately blasphemous. His memento-mori ridicule with grim reaper was devoid of any spiritual consolation. In his famous cycle “Scenes from the Life of Christ” from 1921, the baptism by John looks like a gay sex scene, the preaching like a lesbian passion, the holy family like monsters from hell, and the donkey on the run to Egypt poops . Ensor’s anger against the “fat ideologues” expressed in his wish “Shoot the slouchers and barking prompts” also referred explicitly to the role of the church in the state.
Ensor remained a self-isolated artist throughout his life, who – like another great symbolist of the time, Gustave Moreau – lived with his mother. But with dreams and nightmares that clearly made reality seem, Ensor was not isolated in Belgium at the end of the 19th century. The atmosphere of decadence and indolence, characterized by unjustified privileges and the outsourcing of sexuality to the brothel, had spawned a generation of symbolists much like Ensor in their search for the subconscious. Fernand Khnopff, Félicien Rops and Leon Spilliaert are certainly the most famous painters of this trend. Ensor’s exceptional position is based on the particular originality of his method. For what he showed as grotesque was for him the true face of bourgeois serenity, which he tore off the mask. And that is why James Ensor, who put the brush down in 1941 and died in 1949, is less the “painter of masks”, as he is always referred to, but rather embodies the lively death of their art of disguise.
James Ensor. Mannheim Art Gallery. Until October 3rd. The catalog costs 29.50 euros.
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