Rebellious James

Rebellious James


With my move to Ostend for the art triennial of Beaufort in 2015, Little artnecdotes dedicated a few of her Little artnecdotes contributions to Ostend, the North Sea and Belgium. As introduction one of the most important artists of Ostend, and perhaps even of Belgium, the painter and printmaker James Ensor (1860-1949). Ensor was a major figure in the Belgian avant-garde of the late nineteenth century and a significant precursor to the development of Expressionism in the early twentieth century in Belgium. Socially engaged and self-critical he was involved with the issues of his times and with contemporary debates on the very essence and nature of modernism.

From an idiosyncratic naturalism in the early years Ensor’s art quickly developed into bizarre, fantastic, satirical, grotesque and disordered work. Ensor started, as every artist, with traditional subjects as sea views, sceneries of ordinary people as the fishermen of Ostend and even still lifes. But when time changed politically, socially and culturally by the turn of the 1880s he stopped abruptly with his naturalistic style to immerse himself radically in a different direction. He chose the carnival as subversive theme and used grotesque masks and skeletons in everyday situations. His deep interest in carnival and performance resulted in the presence of masking, travesty and role-playing as recurrent elements.

Ensor saw everything as material for his work. He critized politicians, the clergy, the Catholics and the royal family, but also the mass workers’ movement that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. He mined high and low art, old and new, exotic and familiar, and oscillated between drawing, printmaking and painting. His most famous work is still the mysterious and grotesque painting of Christ’s entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888-early 1890s). To this day his work continues to baffle in its complexity, contradictions and foremost its eccentricity. James was a rebel with a cause. 

De intrede van Christus in Brussel in 1889 (Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 1888-early 1890s. Courtesy Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York/SABAM Brussels

De intrede van Christus in Brussel in 1889 (Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 1888-early 1890s. Courtesy Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York/SABAM Brussels