[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: July 6, 2009]
I did see the Francis Bacon retrospective at the Met this week, and I'll probably visit again before reviewing it. In the meantime, however, a brief note on the unsatisfying James Ensor show at MOMA.
Anyone with a passing knowledge of Ensor's work probably has him filed away as a late nineteenth century expressionist, capable of wild flights of satirical fantasy like "Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889" (painted in 1888, and not in this show).
That's not an unfair verdict. Ensor, born to an English-Flemish family in 1860, and a long-time resident of the downbeat port of Ostend, flourished as an artist in the 1880s and '90s. Less well known is what he did after that - namely, continue to work and develop as a painter for another fifty years. He died, still very busy, in 1949. The retrospective at MOMA will not enlighten viewers on the second half of his career, because it's simply absent. I counted two, maybe three twentieth century works among the one hundred and twenty on show.
Perhaps the curatorial response is that this show doesn't claim to be a comprehensive retrospective. But it's called just "James Ensor" (not, for example, "James Ensor: Expressionist"), and there's some waffle on the website about presenting "a complete picture of this daring, experiential body of work." It's as if a show called simply "Pablo Picasso" broke off in the 1930s, before "Guernica."
Well, maybe that's unfair. I can't point to the great masterpiece of Ensor's later career and say - this is an essential work. But I am very lucky to have seen a selection of his later paintings, at Peter Freeman in SoHo in 2007. He continued to refine and intensify the dense canvasses, crowded with real and fantasty figures, in which he passed sardonic comment on religion, on the Belgian bourgeoisie, and on modern life in general. Alongside these works, I found powerful, searching self-portraits - a series begun in youth, and continued into great old age. Here's an example from 1937 - a casual visitor to MOMA might assume the artist long dead by that date.
Having said what the show is not, I ought to say what it is. It's a good introduction to Ensor's obsessive interest in Belgian carnival masks. This might seem a subject of limited interest, but Ensor deploys the masks with great variety, casting them as demons and devils, using them as a sinister, surreal frame for every day life (see "The Scandalized Masks" (1883)). Skeletons seamlessly stand in for the masked figures in some paintings (the absurd "Skeletons Trying to Warm Themselves"). The juxtaposition of Belgian sobriety and the release of carnival is often very funny. There are some more conventional early works too - still lives, domestic scenes startlingly reminiscent of Bonnard ("The Oyster Eater") and richly colored landscapes.
With many works on paper too, this is clearly a show worth seeing. It's just a pity that the opportunity of offering the definitive summary of Ensor's career was missed.
The main exhibition website, which appears to include all the pictures in the show, is here.
