In Your Wildest Dreams: Ensor Beyond Impressionism Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp 28th September 2024–19th January 2025 

Ensor’s States of Imagination Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp 28th September 2024–19th January 2025 

In 1884 James Ensor (1860–1949) exhibited at the first annual exhibition of Les XX, an association of avantgarde Belgian artists who sought to break away from both the strictures of conservative salons and the openness of the alternative group L’Essor. Although the artist failed to sell a single work, he did attract attention. Ensor, wrote the critic Gustave Lagye, was ‘the giant of Les XX [. . .] With his strong hand he brutalises the beauty of yesteryear [. . .] dishonours it, blackens it, drives it out of the bosom of the Academy [. . .] To him, nothing is small. His clumsiness is gigantic’.[1] The opprobrium did not discourage Ensor. Within a few years he had achieved local and international recognition. Over time, his reputation has gradually eclipsed those of his Belgian contemporaries such as Félicien Rops (1833–98) and Fernand Khnopff (1858–1921), bolstered by a spate of institutional exhibitions in recent years.[2] In 2024, to mark seventy-five years since the artist’s death, four concurrent exhibitions dedicated to Ensor have been staged in Antwerp.[3] The most substantial of these is In Your Wildest Dreams: Ensor Beyond Impressionism at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, which is the culmination of years of research into the museum’s collection of Ensor’s works – the largest in the world. 

The exhibition presents many of Ensor’s major works from the collection – including The intrigue (1890), a ghoulish parade of masked figures against a sombre North Sea sky – alongside loans from other Belgian museums. It is not an encyclopaedic retrospective. Instead, the curator, Herwig Todts, has combined a broad survey approach with a consideration of Ensor’s contemporaries. It includes the work of artists Ensor admired, such as Édouard Manet (1832–83) and Odilon Redon (1840–1916), as well as those who claimed influence from him, such as Emil Nolde (1867–1956). There are also lesser-known names, including Ernst Josephson (1851–1906) and Witold Wojtkiewicz (1879–1909), whose works have thematic and formal affinities with Ensor’s despite their having no known contact with it. In contextualising Ensor, the exhibition hopes to puncture the myth of a ‘tormented, eccentric loner’ (p.6) and to situate him within the artistic climate of his time. 

The exhibition design is intended to capture the theatricality that characterises Ensor’s most well-known works. The visitor enters the galleries through a curtain in the silhouette of the artist’s head, and an introductory video is presented in the manner of a puppet theatre, surrounded by cut-outs from Ensor’s paintings and a reproduction of the titular headgear from Self-portrait with flowered hat (Fig.22). Later in the exhibition, visitors encounter a Bomarzo-esque hellmouth and a wall studded with leering carnival masks, which illustrate Ensor’s interest in popular entertainments and festivities. Such details leaven a serious, research-driven exhibition and publication, which include new information gleaned from X-ray, infra-red, ultraviolet and MA-XRF imaging, as well as more traditional art-historical techniques. 

On the instruction of his father, Ensor began his training aged fifteen under two Ostend-based painters: Michel van Cuyck (1797−1875) and Edouard Dubar (1803−79). After attending the Royal Academy in Brussels from 1877 to 1880, he returned to Ostend and set up a studio in his parents’ attic. His early professional work is in thrall to the French Realists and so it is fitting that the first painting the viewer encounters in the exhibitions is Gustave Courbet’s The wave (1870; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon). Hung nearby, Ensor’s White cloud (1884) is an attempt at a murky seascape in Courbet’s vein, bearing the visible traces of a palette knife. Ensor also made copies of Manet’s paintings from reproductions. Juxtaposition of their work suggests a connection between The oyster eater (1882) – which shows Ensor’s sister Mariëtte dining alone with a single lemon balanced on the table – and the citrus fruit in Manet’s still lifes. A clearer comparison is drawn between Les déclassés (The absinthe drinkers; 1881; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) by Jean-François Raffaëlli and Ensor’s Drunkards (1883; Belfius Art Collection, Brussels), both of which feature a pair of men sitting at a tavern looking rather worse for wear. Ensor’s depiction of the scene demonstrates a propensity for exaggeration, which remained throughout his career: his drunks are sadder and on the verge of collapse, and the rustic outdoor setting of Raffaëlli’s scene becomes a barren, desolate room. 

From The oyster eater onwards, the study of light became a dominant feature in Ensor’s practice. The poet Emilé Verhaeren later described it as ‘the first impressionist work in the history of Belgian art’ (p.50).[4] However, Ensor’s relationship with Impressionism was more conflicted than that with Realism. In a letter from 1881 Ensor counted himself among ‘les impressionnistes’ (p.16), and The bourgeois salon (1881), a painting of his family sitting room, was initially submitted to an exhibition under the title Un salon (Impression). Yet, it is unlikely he had seen any Impressionist paintings first-hand at this point. Indeed, The bourgeois salon was executed in an academic manner, beginning with a brown ground that he worked up; The oyster eater is more lustrous, but Ensor’s brushwork remains far from the Impressionist tache. Ensor himself would go on to repudiate any association. In 1899 he wrote: ‘I was erroneously numbered among the Impressionists, pleinairist painters, attached to light tones’ and that Claude Monet was ‘a lazy colourist’ with ‘a rather vulgar vision’ (p.20).[5] He claimed to have preferred J.M.W. Turner, although he only visited London in 1892, and, as Tofts contends, past critics have often been too keen to take Ensor at his own word. There is an unmistakable change in Ensor’s painting after he encountered Monet’s work at the third Les XX exhibition in 1886. Soon after he painted the vast Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise (1887), a reinterpretation of scene from a mezzotint by John Martin (1789–1854) that shares Monet’s characteristic use of a lightly coloured ground and separate complementary colours. 

Redon also exhibited at Les XX in 1886, and the Symbolist’s influence helped push Ensor towards the proto-Surrealist works that he is most celebrated for today. But where Redon turned to the realm of dreams, Ensor’s work developed a more terrestrial inclination. One of the more significant loans in In Your Wildest Dreams is the fragile Temptation of St Anthony (Fig.23), from the Art Institute of Chicago. This vast drawing comprises fifty-one single and double sheets of sketchbook paper that have been joined together. Ensor’s praying saint is surrounded by a menagerie of exploding heads, crashing trains, sporting demons and flayed men; Christ wears the hat of a Garde Civique member. The sacred is drowned out by the profane. 

In Your Wildest Dreams culminates with a presentation of Ensor’s most celebrated paintings, his ensembles of masked figures and skeletons, which have afforded him a reputation as a predecessor to Expressionism and Surrealism. In these works Ensor combined his study of light with grotesquery. Skeletons tussle over a herring, clenched feebly between their jaws; chattering monsters invade bourgeois interiors and seaside promenades. By placing such diabolical figures in mundane settings and depicting them in luminous colours, Ensor made them all the more disquieting. The exhibition and accompanying publication stress the relationship between these figures and Belgium’s carnival traditions and seaside attractions, such as puppet shows and magic lanterns. Ensor would have known this world well, as his family ran a gift shop for tourists, selling masks and other souvenirs. The artist’s interest in skeletons has often been linked the discovery of human remains during the expansion of Ostend in the late nineteenth century, as well as to his father’s premature death in 1887. By contrast, Todts posits that Ensor may have been responding to a larger European return to the macabre, as seen in the illustrations produced by his fellow Belgian Rops in the 1860s and 1870s. Despite thorough research, much of it demonstrated in the compendious accompanying book, some mysteries remain. One of these is Ensor’s later life. After a period of activity in the nineteenth century, his production slowed down for much of the twentieth. Although he did continue to paint sporadically, using lighter and softer colours than before, he devoted much of his time to playing the harmonium. Several late self-portraits show him consciously performing the character of ‘the painter of masks’ – a magician revealing his tricks. What was sinister in the 1890s is now tamed; the masks are mere carnival attractions. Although Adriaan Gonnissen’s excellent catalogue essay and a small number of works in the exhibition discuss this extended coda, it remains underexplored. 

At the Plantin-Moretus Museum, Ensor’s States of Imagination focuses on the artist’s etchings. Although the museum is primarily known for its collection of Early Modern prints, it also has a significant number of works on paper by modern Belgian artists. Its Ensor holdings include fifteen drawings, four lithographs and 184 impressions of one hundred etching plates, all of which cover a wide range of subject-matter, including landscapes, crowd scenes, portraits and caricatures. Some of Ensor’s etchings have a blunter satirical edge than his paintings. Doctrinal nourishment (1889), for example, shows King Leopold II and other authority figures defecating on a mob. Ensor tried to suppress the series after he was made a baron in 1933. Like Todts, the exhibition curators, Willemijn Stammis and Izanna Mulder, have produced a formidable quantity of new research into these works. They have tracked countless revisions made by Ensor to his copperplates, from the removal of a drip of mucus to the spelling correction of ‘Mustart’ to ‘Mustard’. 

Ensor began printmaking in 1886, before his paintings had become commercially successful. He initially relied on his friend Théodore Hannon (1851–1916), an experienced etcher and promoter of printing, to apply the ground and later etch the drawn plates. Hannon’s sister, Mariette Rousseau- Hannon, Ensor’s closest friend, acted as an intermediary until Ensor installed his own acid bath in 1888. Whereas Ensor’s painting engaged in dialogue with contemporary developments, his etching practice was more clearly influenced by close study of the Northern masters, with evident traces of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. For example, in Devils thrashing angels and archangels (1888), Ensor supplants Bosch’s treeman from The garden of earthly delights (1490–1500; Museo Nacional Prado, Madrid) into a scene that recalls Bruegel’s Fall of the rebel angels (1562; Royal Museum of Fine Arts). 

Rembrandt was also a key reference. Ensor’s Hunter (1888) is a copy of the old master’s Landscape with a shepherd and a dog (c.1648; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), albeit with a mountain removed. Ensor once described his career as a ‘quest for light’, echoing the Dutch master’s own interest (p.77).[6] Moreover, much like Rembrandt, Ensor often used unusual supports, such as parchment and satin. His etchings are fascinating for the variance in their treatment, which matches their diverse subject-matter. He used coloured inks and hand-painted prints with watercolour, transforming them into unique works of art and also, occasionally, altering their meaning. For example, Pride (Fig.24), from the Seven deadly sins series was coloured by hand to convert the central figure into a judge. A seemingly small intervention, but one that made a generalised satire a focused jab. 

A highlight of the exhibition is the pairing of a print from the first state of My portrait as a skeleton (1889; Mu.ZEE, Ostend) with a later iteration. The first depicts the artist gazing towards the viewer. After the first impression, he incised new lines into the plate and changed his face into a grimacing skull. Ensor’s work often features an element of masquerade, but it is striking that even in a self-portrait he sought to capture a character rather than a straightforward semblance of himself. By showing the minutiae of his processes, Ensor’s States of Imagination allows us to view the artist with remarkable intimacy. Ensor was especially adept at fashioning his public persona, but these exhibitions and the research that accompanies them do much to peel off his mask. 

[1] G. Lagye: ‘L’art jeune: Exposition des XX’, La Fédération Artistique 11 (1st March 1884), reproduced in the accompanying publication: James Ensor: Stoutste dromen, Het impressionisme voorbij. Edited by Herwig Todts. 272 pp. incl. 230 col. + b. & w. ills. (Hannibal Books, Antwerp, 2024), €45. ISBN 978–94–6494–130–2, p.14. English edition: James Ensor: Wildest Dreams, Beyond Impressionism, €49.50. ISBN 978–94–6494–144–9. 

[2] See, for example, A. Swinbourne, ed.: exh. cat. James Ensor, New York (Museum of Modern Art) 2009; and L. Tuymans et al.: exh. cat. James Ensor by Luc Tuymans, London (Royal Academy of Arts) 2016–17. 

[3] The other two exhibitions are Masquerade, Make-up & Ensor at MoMu, Antwerp (28th September–5th January 2025), which juxtaposes Ensor with contemporary artists to examine the beauty industry, and Cindy Sherman at the Fotomuseum, Antwerp (28th September–2nd February 2025), which draws on the American artist’s similarities to Ensor in her critical take on social conventions through masks and disguises. See K. Debo, E. De Wyngaert and R. Cockx: exh. cat. Masquerade, Make-up & Ensor, Antwerp (MoMU) 2024–25; and A. Nappo, ed.: Cindy Sherman: Anti-fashion, Stuttgart (Staatsgalerie), Hamburg (Deichtorhallen and Sammlung Falckenberg) and Antwerp (Fotomuseum) 2024. 

[4] H. Todts, ed.: James Ensor. Occasional Modernist: Ensor’s Artistic and Social Ideas and the Interpretation of his Art, Turnhout 2018, p.86. 

[5] James Ensor, quoted from X. Tricot, ed.: James Ensor: Lettres, Brussels 1999, pp.271–72. 

[6] Accompanying publication: James Ensor and the Graphic Experiment. Edited by Izanna Mulder and Willemijn Stammis. 128 pp. incl. 155 col. + b. & w. ills. (Hannibal Books, Antwerp, 2024), €39.95. ISBN 978–94–6494–142–5.