Exhibit of the week: James Ensor

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Through Sept. 21

No scholar could write the history of ­modern art and leave out James Ensor, said Simon Schama in the Financial Times. At the same time, “no one has any idea” how to categorize the eclectic Belgian artist, who lived as a recluse and painted surpassingly strange canvases. Was he an impressionist? An expressionist? A symbolist? Something else? The Museum of Modern Art has mounted “the first major show in a very long time” dedicated to the artist, giving viewers the chance to peer for themselves into Ensor’s heated imagination. “By turns lurid, lyrical, mysterious, sophomorically satirical,” and soaringly spiritual, his paintings can seem like the product of several different artists. “His was a sensibility as twitchy as a bat, swooping out of the air and vacuuming up whatever took his fancy on any particular Tuesday.”

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Fortunately for art lovers, most days he had a lot of odd and interesting items at hand, said Howard Halle in Time Out New York. Ensor spent his most productive years living in an attic above his family’s novelty shop, which catered to tourists in seaside Ostend. Many of these odds and ends eventually found their way into Ensor’s paintings—most noticeably “carnival­ masks and skulls expressing the futility and irony of existence.”­ Skeletons Trying to Warm Themselves (1889) shows two bony figures huddled around his studio’s iron stove, while countless images of “macabre and fantastical”­ masked subjects seem to present the world as a cosmic joke. The young Ensor “was obsessed with mortality,”­ a fixation that fueled his best work. Though he lived to 89, “his most creative period was relatively short,” and over before he turned 40.

In that brief time he created several dozen masterworks—many of them self-portraits—filled with “hilarious, gruesome beauty,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. Ensor “depicted himself as a cross-dressed dandy, a rotting corpse, a bug, a fish, Albrecht Dürer, and a crucified Jesus.” He also shows up here as a vagrant urinating against a wall, and—once—as a pickled herring. Ensor’s exhibitions of “exultantly defiant martyrdom” reveal a streak of self-hatred as well as an utter disdain for the rest of the world. In other works, he viciously satirizes politicians, businessmen, and fellow artists. The mystery is how this rude, crude satirist could simultaneously create such spiritually transcendent works as Christ’s Entry Into Jerusalem. Ensor’s “visionary” paintings suggest, disconcertingly, that “the distance from a joke to a shock to a prayer” may be shorter than we think.