Prototype Issue
LACMA's Doctrinal Nourishment: Art and Anarchism in the Time of James Ensor
By Robin Menken
(page 1 of 2)With all the large shows opening in museums around town this season, a jewel box of a show like LACMA's Doctrinal Nourishment: Art and Anarchism in the Time of James Ensor seemed to disappear under the radar.
This wonderfully curated show celebrating LACMA’s acquisition of the Ensor etching “Doctrinal Nourishment-Alimentation Doctrinaire,” one of only three hand-colored impressions in existence, ran from April 10 to July 6.
The exhibition featured 50 works on paper by the radical Belgian artist James Ensor, as well as works on paper from Goya, the French political cartoonists who influenced him (Honoré Daumier, Joseph Traviès de Villers and Charles Pilipon), contemporaries who shared his subversive vision (Félicien Rops, Felix Vallotin and Odilon Redon) and the next generation of artists who were influenced by him. The show has more impact and ideas than many shows 20 times its size.
“Doctrinal Nourishment-Alimentation Doctrinaire” vilifies the oppressive rule of Belgium’s autocratic KIng Leopold II (1865-1909), the masses who swallowed his policies (scatological metaphors abound) and the unstable socio-political climate of his regime. In the two versions on display, Ensor depicts the monarchy, the government, the clergy and the army as bare-assed tyrants emptying their bowels into the open mouths of the ravenous crowd, and castigates the blind obedience of the masses.
Ensor shares with Nabis painter Felix Vallotin a fascination with the new chaos in the street. As in Vallotin’s dynamic woodcut The Uprising also in the show, an almost cinematic tension brings to life the social upheaval through tumultuous crowd scenes. Carnival imagery and masked figures echo his celebrated oil The Entry of Christ into Brussels part of the Getty collection. Too fragile to be moved, the fourteen foot canvas is permanently installed at the Getty. Its companion piece, the brilliant print produced almost a decade later, is on view at LACMA. In this, as in all his crowd scenes, he fills the crowd with portraits of people he knew
Ensor participated in “Zwanze” events and shows, (a burlesque form of Belgian art featuring collage and word-play) resembling the later Dadaist movement. Considered the founder of the avant-garde group Les XX (the Twenty), a group which promoted artistic developments across Europe, Ensor’s agitated brushstroke and radical application of paint (using palette knife, dabbing and feathering) was much admired and copied. Ensor had strong differences of opinion with other group members, who ultimately disbanded the group against his wishes. Doctrinal Nourishment-Alimentation Doctrinaire (1889) was rejected by Les XX and was not publicly displayed until 1929.
In the 1880’s, when public criticism made it difficult to sell his paintings, Ensor taught himself etching, a traditional form of copperplate printmaking. In his hands, etching became as expressive as drawing. His superb craftsmanship, combining printmaking and hand coloring made him a modern master. He saw reproductions as his link to the future.
Ensor’s bright, dissonant colors, garish and often unmixed, recall the French lithographic posters by Jules Chéret and other Maîtres de l’Affiche of the Belle Époque. In Ensor’s visual cacaphony, you see the influences of British satirists like George Cruikshank, Henry Mayhew, William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson, though these connections are not explored in this exhibition.
Ensor’s mother ran a curio shop that sold puppets, dolls and carnival masks for the Ostend Carnival. Skulls, masks, Commedia del arte costumes, this imagery is the meat of Ensor’s work. Like Goya before him, and Félicien Rops, Ensor blended elements of the grotesque, the perverse and the bizarre to cut through the complacency of his time, and reveal the irrational side of the crumbling monarchy. This modern sense of dislocation is why his images have haunted the modern sensibility.
Part of the first room is devoted to some of Ensor’s influences. In Joseph Traviès “de Villers Melasse,” KIng Louis-Philippe is a “cock of shit,” literally. Daumier’s Gargantua lampoons King Louis-Philippe, known as the “pear” (slang for simpleton). The corpulent king spills over his enormous chair, as a conveyor belt delivers tribute from the wretchedly poor into his mouth. The bags of coins pass through his bowels, transforming into favors for his ministers. (Where are out social satirists now?)
Like Ensor, Belgian painter Félicien Rops admired Edgar Allen Poe and the Gothic writers. In “The Supreme Vice,” (1884) a handsome society couple are dressed for the evening: a headless skeleton in tux awaits his flirtatious skeleton lady who, skirt raised, fan unfurled, steps out of her coffin. In his litho “Juin” (1852), you can trace Rops’ influence on the cartoonist and architectural fantasist Windsor McKay (“Little Nemo”). In “Satan Sowing the Tare” (1906), you cans see the influence of Rops on Tim Burton as a sabot wearing, gangly legged death strides across a glowering field.
Rops and Ensor’s ironic meditations on death drew on the German medieval woodcuts of Totendanz. In common with Mexico’s Jose Posada, their skeletons at work or at play to illustrate the corruption under the surface of daily life. Rivera’s large murals, peopled with caricatures of friends and notables and rich with social protest belong in the camp that Ensor started.
In the hand colored etching “Devils Threshing Angels and Archangels” (1888) a composition of wildly imaginative lines, rather than “taking a line for a walk” like Klee, Ensor takes his line for a gavotte. His intricate cascade of interlocking grotesques lies on a continuum of art, midway between Bosch and “Yellow Submarine.” “Wizards in a Squall” (1888) ride brooms, borne aloft by their own flatulence. In “Hopfrog’s Revenge” (1898), chained bodies of demons, whipped by the devil, writhe in agony, hanging over a vast ballroom, filled with grotesquely costumed partygoers.
Many of the etchings are scabrous in their denunciation. In “The Good Judges” (1894), depicting the trial of two falsely accused men, body parts crowd the judge’s table. A spider web links two of the bored judges. Ensor, as a snot-nosed lawyer futilely addresses the court. “The Gendarmes” (1888), captures police brutality during a fisherman’s strike in Ensor’s hometown. The hand colored “Bad Docters” (1895) is a medical horror-show.
In the masterful Belgium in the XlXth Century (1889), King Leopold ll stares down on a riot, oblivious to the cause of social turmoil. “What do you want?” he muses, “Are you content?”
Other works take a gentler approach. “Sick Wretch Warming Himself” (1888) ennobles a poor veteran, anticipating the Expressionist vision of the impoverished, abandoned veterans of World War l. Searing prints from German expressionists, Emil Nolde, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Otto Lange, Käthe Kollwitz, and Belgian printmaker Walter Vaes show the influence of Ensor’s work on the next generation.
“Small Bizarre Figures” (1888), resembles the popular mass-produced images called Grimaces (from the Frankish word for mask), cataloging supposed traits and facial expressions of social types and classes. (Based on 18th century Physiognomic studies, these facial stereotypes led to the “scientific” racial coding of the 19th century.)
In “The Pisser,” Ensor pisses on the wall under a graffiti that reads, “Ensor is a crazy man”.
Ensor chronicled the rapid urbanization of the last half of 19th century. Tearing up the winding medieval streets, King Leopold transformed Brussels into an Imperial city, a bedlam of building speculators. Citizens experienced sensory overload brought on by mass transportation, department stores, aggressive advertising and the burgeoning art of photography. The new pedestrian experience, encouraged by wide boulevards and triumphal squares, transformed into spectacle. Official processions of civic pride clashed with anti-authoritarian demonstrations. Since the Paris Commune, European social scientists theorized about crowd behavior, giving voice to the educated middle classes’ anxiety about mob behavior. Ensor’s exaggerated, aggressive work, with detailed compositions that rival Breugal, capture that anxiety while uncovering the roots of social unrest.
One of King Leopold’s public development schemes was to restructure the dunes surrounding Ostend.
Critiquing Ostend’s beach, overrun by city-dwellers, “The Baths Of Ostend” (1899) is the most decorative piece in the show. The application of colored pencil and oil on wood is almost whimsical. Taking his cue from the undulating dunes, every tiny figure, every wave, every design element echoes the sinuous curves of a bather climbing a ladder on the left side of the work. Bare assed swimmers romp, sunbathers moon the spectator, a transgressive couple kisses.
If I might make a film illusion, it’s reminiscent of the brilliant Coney Island sequence of Douglas Sirk’s “Imitation Of Life Behind Lana Turner,” an entire beach of tiny figures stretches into the background, each and every one of them dressed and accessorized in the same limited palette; decorative and wryly critical.
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