The strange and surreal universe of James Ensor

The text below is the excerpt of the book James Ensor (ISBN: 9798894057675), written by Émile Verhaeren and James Ensor, published by Parkstone International.

It was between 1880 and 1885 that James Ensor produced his most beautiful paintings. His work is not a summer harvest or an autumn grape-picking; it is above alia spring germination. His strength, free to the point of excess, his personality was violent to the point of exasperation, and his superb, outrageous independence made him an admirable youth. He created abundantly, overabundantly even, with acuity. Before the many critics had set their sights on him, he had already produced everything that was later to arouse favour or hatred. He was therefore unable to give either praise or blame time to take hold of him, or to alter his work in any way. The flowering of his talent was like an explosion. Suddenly, he appeared almost in his full stature.

He began in 1879 by painting his own Portrait, to which he added two compositions: Judas throwing money into the temple and Orestes tormented by the Furies: Judas throwing money into the temple and Orestes tormented by the Furies; then in 1880 came Le Lampiste (exhibited at Y Essor in 1883 and at Les XX in 1884) and La Coloriste, two canvases in which all his art is asserted, and this marvellous Flacon bleu, which remains perhaps the most astonishing still life he ever painted. What a marvellous piece! A crude table supports a plucked chicken, shabby and painful, its neck hanging in the air and its flesh in greenish tones worrying. Here and there, with the stroke of a knife, the colour is spread out. The hand that constructs and paints with such solidity and poise already seem to be that of a master. And the eye that sees the magnificent, chosen tone of the bottle already knows all the strength and rarity of a tone. Admittedly, the composition is absent: it is only a lovingly treated piece; it is only a corner of the kitchen shown in the right light, but what luminous life, what splendour, what brilliance! No famous still life stands between the work and the admiration of the passer-by. Everything is new, spontaneous, obvious, definitive. Where, then, has the eye been trained to see these poor, everyday objects as no one has ever seen them before? Does it contain within itself an unknown subtlety, an unknown delicacy, or has the spectacle of the sea that the painter has constantly before his eyes and which offers itself to him with its infinite disinences of hues at every hour of the day – dawn, noon and evening – endowed the artist with an extraordinary sense?

The Lampist, which is currently decorating the Musée Moderne in Brussels, is a very simple arrangement. Against a grey background, a boy dressed entirely in black is holding a copper lantern. He looks at it, and the glass and metal shine. You could say that the subject of the painting exists in the colour itself. These broad masses of grey and black, enlivened by the few yellow details of the lantern, create a kind of calm conflict. After all, isn’t every painting a kind of combat? The tubes, with their violence and diversity of colour, appear to be loaded with dangerous machine-gun fire. If the painter does not calculate their force, if he lets them detonate, without disciplining their din, if he doesn’t contain them on one side to give them a better career on the other, the battle he is fighting will be irretrievably lost. He has to anticipate the brilliance of oranges next to blues, or greens next to reds, or yellows next to purples. He has to judge how the transitional tints will soften the impact of colours that are too bold. He needs to know what a bold tone in one place will bring disorder or life to the whole. There is a cowardly way of painting, thanks to badgering, which hides the difficulties and dulls the art. Ensor would never be familiar with this cowardly and fatal process.

The blacks against which the luminous object stands out support it with their sombre vigour; there is no clash, only happy audacity.

La Coloriste has a more abundant use of colour than Le Lampiste. A woman in white sits in a studio lit by a window. Fabrics, vases and screens surround her. This painting was shown at La Chrysalide in 1881. This long-established circle, whose exhibition space was in the Salle Janssens (rue du Gentilhomme, then rue du Petit Écuyer), was led by masters such as Louis Dubois, Artan, Vogels, Rops, Pantazis and others. They cultivated a painting with solid qualities, done with a knife, which they claimed to have emerged from, or rather derived from, the powerful and radiant aesthetics of their ancestors. This opinion was certainly not untrue, although it had to be admitted that these powerful painters who rightly claimed to be of their own origin had all looked too insistently at the canvases of Courbet from the Franche-Comté region. It is true that Courbet liked to dwell at length on those of Rubens, Snyders and Jordaens, and that the powerful, earthy, firm and delicious painting he advocated was none other than Flemish painting itself.

In La Coloriste, colour is no longer distributed in wide shots as it was in Le Lampiste. On the contrary. It is divided, disseminated and scattered. Without Ensor’s tact, the multiplicity of greens, reds, blues and yellows would result in a few flickers. The painted screens would be no more than a collection of rockets, and the painting would belie its title. But the painter wanted La Coloriste to teach us what a good canvas should be. Against a background where the reds and greys establish their deep, solid chords, the light, multicoloured tones sing their high, lively notes with precision and variety, each of them resting on the springboard of vigorous fundamental sonorities before launching themselves towards joy. From one end of the canvas to the other, the subtle links that bind the colours together are as tight and knotted as the notes on a page of music, happily written.

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