Page 41 - Studio International - September 1971

Vuillard, Bonnard, van Gogh and the Kubin, owned extensive collections of Ensor's and parks are full of unhappy people who
Luminists', he wrote later, 'I indicated all the graphics, and Klee, in admiration, sent two of cannot travel to the country'. Later, Strindberg
modern experiments, all the influence of light, his lithographs to the old man at Ostend, overcomes his fear and ventures out into the
the liberation of vision', a statement which although it is not known what Ensor thought of street, only to regret his decision when he is
would smack of delusions of grandeur were it them. Nolde, who drew more heavily on Ensor's surrounded by teeming crowds of people, all of
not true. example than any of his contemporaries, went them maimed or deformed in some way. 'It was
He believed that he was the victim of some on a pilgrimage to Ostend, the first important a collection of all the miseries which had stayed
kind of conspiracy, and became increasingly German artist to do so, and when Belgium was hidden for the winter and had now crept out
concerned with painting his predicament. occupied during the Great War, others followed, into the sun... I have seen such people-like

Typical is Dangerous Cooks (1896), which is most notably Heckel who got on with Ensor creatures represented in Ensor's occult mask
both pathetic and farcical, and shows Ensor's very well. scenes, and I believed then that they were
head on a herring's body being served up to It is easy to see why Ensor's achievement was fantasies and exaggerations ...the collection of
the critics for dinner while the heads of other prized especially in Germany, where there were monstrosities continued into the town until I
artists wait on shelves. In Ecce Homo, or Christ several large collections of his prints, and where eventually reached my door where it was as
and the Critics Ensor portrays himself again as a catalogue of the graphics was published as though I had been released from a powerful
Christ with the Crown of Thorns being early as 1913. Twenty-five years before German dream!'
tormented by the two critics Max Sulzberger artists began to explore the darker regions of their After Ensor's mother and aunt died in 1917,
and Eduard Fétis. minds, to exploit the expressive possibilities of Ensor left the studio where he had always lived
Ensor continued to believe in the conspiracy distortion and to incorporate in their paintings and moved to another house, also in the Rue de
until long after efforts had been made to a pessimistic view of humanity, Ensor had felt Flandre, which had another toy and curio shop
reinstate him. In 1899 a special issue of La the same pressures and had gone over the same belonging to the family on the ground floor. Out
Plume, the French Symbolist review, was ground. But the similarities between Ensor's of this shop he made a kind of museum of his
devoted to Ensor, exhibitions were organized vision and that of many of the Expressionists childhood, and he lived above it until his death
and, in 1908, Ensor's friend Verhaeren lies deeper than the mere fact of influences and with two ageing and rickety servants,
published the first monograph. Living in a similar use of colour and imagery. Ensor surrounded by masks, puppets and pictures,
isolation in Ostend, surrounded in his room anticipated a peculiarly modern state of mind with Christ's Entry on the wall above his
above the shop by masks, shells, Chinoiserie, which is what made The Entry of Christ into harmonium. At the end of his life, famous now,
ornately framed paintings, velvet, bombazine Brussels appear especially urgent to Germans a he was chiefly occupied with receiving visitors
and chintz, waited on by two servants, Ensor generation later. for whom he had evolved an impressive ritual,
became the object of much myth-making, It is remarkable how closely Ensor's vision the same for everyone. They came from all over
especially abroad. And as the myth-making parallels that of the Expressionists, how, for the world to Ostend to visit the master and
grew, Ensor's art declined. From about 1898 example, Heym's city poems often seem to be afterwards they would go home to write up
onwards Ensor did little more than concentrate descriptions of Ensor's paintings, and how identical pieces in their newspaper or magazine.
on copies or pastiches of earlier work which he Meidner's apocalyptic cityscapes appear as Ensor died in November 1949 and his
falsely dated. As the Expressionists were to do extreme extensions of Ensor's work. Interesting funeral must have been like one of his pictures
later, Ensor had shot his bolt while young. At evidence of the eloquence with which Ensor's brought to life. Through the streets of Ostend,
the moment when his work went into decline paintings spoke to the Expressionists is provided bombed to a shambles of blackened ruins, there
younger artists, the brothers De Smet, Permeke by Strindberg in passages from his processed in stately fashion bishops in mitres,
and van den Berghe moved together to the autobiography in which he describes how he ambassadors in tri-cornered hats, generals with
village of Laethem-Saint-Martin and continued senses the threatening power of large anonymous their medals, critics and magistrates. They
the tradition of Flemish Expressionism which crowds. He even refers specifically to Ensor at moved to music played by a military band while
Ensor had unknowingly initiated. one point: 'The evenings are growing longer bells rang, flags flew and speeches pompously
Ensor's name was especially well-known in and longer', he wrote, 'but I know from declaimed. It was the kind of desperate farce
German artistic circles. Some of the artists, like experience that I cannot go out, for the streets Ensor would greatly have appreciated. q
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