“James Ensor. Maestro”

For his 40th birthday in 1900, Belgian famous artist James Ensor (1860–1949) created almost all the art works that would bring him fame: paintings, drawings, and prints depicting the world as a nightmarish and chaotic spectacle. The mask and the skull, his signature images, became a kind of friends for the artist, a reliable source of inspiration that could be used repeatedly to infinity. But does Ensor’s creativity exhaust itself with this bubbling mixture of carnival and Halloween? The organizers of the art exhibition that recently opened at the Brussels Palace of Fine Arts (Bozar) are convinced that it does not.

The art exhibition, timed to the 75th anniversary of James Ensor’s death, includes one and a half hundred art works. It was prepared by Xavier Tricot, a Belgian art historian and author of the catalog raisonné “Ensor. All Paintings.” He explains that the word “maestro” in the art exhibition’s title is, on one hand, due to Ensor’s masterful command of various artistic techniques, and on the other hand, refers to the world of classical music, as Ensor was a talented musician and composer. By focusing on art works created by the artist in his later period, the exhibition organizers give special attention to his little-known ballet from 1911, “The Gamma of Love,” presented here through a variety of exhibits—from the original handwritten score to posters created by Ensor—and position this work as the quintessence of his multifaceted talent.

The art exhibition traces the artist’s journey from his student fascination with Impressionism to his early-developed mature style—through art works such as “Icon. Portrait of Eugène Demolder” (1893) from the Groeninge Museum in Bruges. In this oil and pencil painting on board, Ensor placed a characteristic Dutch religious composition above a demonic trio consisting of his friend and two figures on the sides, who appear to be either dressed for carnival in Ostend or have emerged from Bosch’s vision of hell. In the painting “Pierrot and the Skeletons” (1905), hell is already situated in the very center of the composition, depicting the pantomime hero with a bloody knife in hand, surrounded by a crowd of skeletons dressed in carnival costumes.

Although James Ensor initially had quite a scandalous reputation, he made significant strides toward becoming a respectable figure in Belgian art before World War I. In 1929, King Albert granted him the title of Baron, and shortly before that, the newly opened Palace of Fine Arts held a major retrospective of the artist, which included the 2.5-meter satirical masterpiece “The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889” (1888), which had never been publicly exhibited before due to its provocative nature. In 1987, the work made its way to the United States and is now among the iconic art exhibits at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Trico included several archival photographs from the 1929 retrospective in the exhibition, one of which shows the painting in its original Brussels installation. Another photograph, titled “James Ensor Surrounded by Masks,” presents an ironic portrait of the gray-haired artist-barone surrounded by museum staff dressed in carnival costumes, as if they had stepped out of his paintings.