Page 39 - Studio International - September 1971

James Ensor which was to provide him with the material for nineteenth-century storytelling, but the uses to
The Entry of Christ into Brussels
his greatest paintings. He began to trace the which Ensor puts masks were unique. In his
2 James Ensor descent in black and white, and produced work the masquerade becomes an unmasking,
Self-portrait with Hat mainly drawings between 1883 and 1887. One as though the mask were the true mirror of the
of them, The Devils Dzittzs and Hihax leading soul, revealed when the real face is taken away.
Christ into Hell (1886), is a good example of the In The Singular Masks (1892), for example,
uneasy mixture of grotesque humour and each face looks like the personification of some
gruesome vision which Ensor was to exploit humour, the group like a comedy of manners in
from now on. One of the devils looks more like which all the characters are unsympathetic.
a clown, and the weird creatures which cluster Ensor found in masks the richness of meaning
2 around the left of the drawing might have come which Gauguin later found in Tahitian art,
from some child's storybook. It is a mixture of Picasso in African wood-carving, and Kirchner
the light-hearted and deadly earnest found later and his friends in Melanesian art. In this sense
in Alfred Kubin, an Austrian artist who was too, Ensor's use of masks was a pioneer
enormously impressed by Ensor's achievements. achievement.
The most important of the small number of After 1886, when Ensor began to etch, his
oils painted during these four years was Haunted work became increasingly powerful and
Furniture (1885), now destroyed. Here, for the employed the life of Christ as a major theme.
first time, the presence of masks cannot be But Ensor approached the subject not as a
rationally explained. Here, quite clearly, the Christian—he was anything but—but with the
Mardi Gras is far away, and the contrast intention of using a mythological story as the
between the little girl reading, her mother framework for the depiction of the struggle
sewing in a bourgeois interior, and the masks between good and evil. These etchings,
which surround them both is both eerie and amazingly accomplished technically for a
terrifying. beginner in a difficult medium, clearly owe a
Masks now begin to dominate Ensor's work, great deal to Rembrandt. The interpretation of
which becomes in turn frightening, coarse, the subject-matter however is closer to Bosch,
blasphemous and obscene. Ensor was not the and there is no doubt that Ensor is increasingly
first to use masks. Artists and writers had working out his obsessions in his art.
employed them for a variety of reasons before. The etchings on the life of Christ are
Callot set an obvious precedent, but even more horrifying and have none of the humour of
important were Ensor's Belgian contemporary other work. In Christ in Agony (1886), a drawing
Rops and Edgar Allen Poe, whom Ensor had related to the etchings, Christ is surrounded by
both read and illustrated. The masked ball, used ape-like forms and skeletons, one of which is
of course by Poe, is a recurrent theme in eating Christ's flesh while a bird-like creature
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