Listening to a song called "Home" by a band called Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros I start to write down my thoughts on first viewing of the
James Ensor show at MOMA. Funnily enough, earlier today, I caught a spot on Brian Lehrer in which They Might Be Giants sing a song about Ensor. More people should sing about visual artists. They need the back up, especially painters. As my old Aunt Lu used to say: “You can walk around a sculpture but paintings stand still. It is really quite annoying.” She wished paintings moved. I always felt they did but these days they really do. They get attached to whirligigs, are projected onto walls, are in fact videos, do in fact move around the space they are in. As opposed to TMBG Ensor might’ve preferred the sound of a drunken brass band recorded as they walked down the streets in Ostende followed by a triumphant Christ. Maybe not. He did have a sense of humor. Look at his macabre side as one side of his expression, one expression. Each painting in the show at MOMA strikes with a small and potent electric shock, even the somber interiors. In those apparently still lifes there is always a thickly palette knifed spot of color that yells joyfully. I saw bits of Mondrian and Poliakoff. More obviously, later on, one collides with Blake and Daumier having a drunken brawl, and bumps into Constant Permeke Gustave De Smet and Frits van den Berghe (as boys) in his painting of a boy streetlamp lighter. You can see Gustave Moreau hanging on his shoulder and Ensor laughing him off. In one painting, a big one, in which Adam and Eve are banished from Eden, I don’t feel restraint on God’s part. He is telling them to piss off. He isn’t kidding around. The painting though is in no way pious.
Ensor trowels the paint on and scrapes it off gleefully. He plays with gender, and digs deep under the paper in his drawings refusing to make them easy.
A painting called in the Baths at Ostende (1890) reminds me of these books I read as a child published by Country Life about a (marmalade) cat called Orlando. They were written and illustrated by Kathleen Hale and are highly eccentric but I loved the drawings, the same I that responded to James Ensor the first time I encountered him. This though is the deepest show of his work I have ever seen and one I thoroughly recommend. Though he lived to the ripe old age of 89 his best work apparently unfolded before his mid forties. What did he do for the rest of his life? Did he rest on his many laurels? I’ve more research to do but unfortunately the fonts in Wikipedia are coming up all garbled and I cannot currently access more information—not without going to a library—and who can do that in the middle of a work day? Hmmm?
Grosz, who had a deeply ingrained antiauthoritarian
