Etched in scorn

WHAT kind of an artist inspires a brilliant, oddball band like They Might Be Giants to write an art historical ditty in his honor? A brilliant, oddball artist like James Ensor, whose work, after more than 100 years, remains refreshingly strange and caustic.

“Meet James Ensor, / Belgium’s famous painter. / Dig him up and shake his hand, / appreciate the man,” starts the 1994 song. It goes on to mention that Ensor lived with his mother and repeated himself, both of which are true. But the song also laments that “the world has forgotten, / the world moved along,” which, thankfully, is no longer accurate.

Ensor (1860-1949) has been given the retrospective treatment many times over, though not for decades in the U.S. Nearly 20 years ago, the J. Paul Getty Museum acquired Ensor’s monumental, carnivalesque painting “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889” (1888), but until now it had not staged a show devoted to the artist.

“Ensor’s Graphic Modernism” takes a close look at 33 of the artist’s prints, those specifically resonant with the themes of “Christ’s Entry.” At 8 feet in height and 14 in width, the painting is the centerpiece of the show -- as it would be of any show that included it. It radiates like a giant, confounding sun around which the prints, remarkable idiosyncrasies in themselves, orbit like satellites.

Ensor lived most of his life in the fishing village of Ostend, where he was born. His family ran a curio shop filled with masks and other souvenirs that worked their way into his most intriguing images. After fulfilling a tour of duty at the Academie Royale in nearby Brussels, Ensor returned to Ostend, shed much of what he had learned (about the importance of high finish, for instance) and parodied the rest. He did paint portraits, interiors, seascapes, still lifes and religious subjects, but increasingly he spurned decorum and aggressively courted the grotesque, vulgar, satirical and confrontational. His most distinctive work is his most subversive, sniping metaphors of political, religious and military authority.

Consider the hilarious and repulsive hand-colored etching “Doctrinal Nourishment” from 1889. A nun, a bishop, a king and a military officer sit on a ledge with their bare backsides to us. Putrid yellow feces stream down onto the assembled crowd below, the common people, well-trained to passively take it, even eat it up.

“Christ’s Entry Into Brussels” hinges on a similar conflict between power and the people. Ensor hails the social body and at the same time caricatures it. He spills the parading crowd right onto us, as if we were continuous with the motley assortment of buffoons with their garish, bulbous features and lurid colored masks, all painted in thick, raw strokes.

Granted, the scene takes place during Mardi Gras, and Ostend was known for its elaborate carnival festivities, but Ensor pushes the scene beyond dressing up and letting loose into the tenuous territory of lapsed social order. Christ, the honored guest (modeled after the artist himself), barely stands out in the cacophony. Bright and dense and inexhaustible, the painting is a spectacle of grand proportion and critical detail.

A summation of Ensor’s talents and torments, “Christ’s Entry” stayed in the artist’s house for 40 years before it was shown publicly, at a major retrospective exhibition in Brussels in 1929. That same year, Ensor, previously knighted, was given the title of baron. His rising status as a Belgian national treasure had softened the edges of his political views, and he had painted out several slogans on banners held aloft by the parading crowd in the painting, one teaming Christ with a Belgian socialist reformer.

In the 1880s and ‘90s, his most prolific years, Ensor was at his most irreverent. In 1883, he helped found Les Vingt (The Twenty), an avant-garde exhibition society, and that same year began to use masks in his work, turning to them for their “freshness of color, extravagant decoration, wild generous gestures, strident expressions, exquisite turbulence.”

Masquerade is one of many forms of mischief in Ensor’s repertoire. Caricature and exaggeration also permeate his prints. He invited death -- the skull, the skeleton -- into his art nearly as often as the satirist Jose Guadalupe Posada, his Mexican contemporary. Ensor’s amusing little etching “My Portrait in 1960” shows the artist reclining, reduced to bones and a few tufts of hair.

Ensor’s dark sense of humor frequently veered toward the crude and scatological. Figures in his prints vomit, fart, urinate, defecate, eviscerate and more. Depravity, Ensor suggests, is a normal part of life. Better to look and laugh than to ignore it.

He turned to printmaking in 1886 and produced 133 images, mostly etchings. In 1888 alone he made 44, all characterized by the same precise, slightly agitated line. The delicacy of his strokes is reminiscent of Rembrandt; the indelicacy of his subject matter stretches more toward Hogarth, Daumier and even Bosch.

Some of his prints became the basis for later paintings, and some were variants of paintings already existing. Two later prints and an earlier drawing relate directly to “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889” and are positioned in front of the painting so that the images can be compared. Louis Marchesano, Getty Research Institute curator of prints and drawings, and Scott Schaefer, Getty Museum curator of paintings, have drawn from two private collections in assembling this tightly focused show exploring Ensor’s take on city crowds and processions, demons, sins and multiple manifestations of the artist’s self.

Ensor had trouble selling paintings in the early 1880s, and making prints, especially his lovely coastal views not included in this show, must have seemed good financial strategy. Prints also appealed to him for their durability. Ensor feared that painting was too fragile and perishable a medium to carry his name into the future.

His legacy, however, is quite secure. Traces of Ensor’s influence have emerged since his day, in the work of Paul Klee, on up to Irving Petlin, and maybe even in the photographs of masked characters by Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

“Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889” imprints itself indelibly in the memory, and so do most of the strange and wonderful prints in this show. They Might Be Giants encourages it in song, and this welcome and overdue assembly of Ensor’s work makes it possible: “Raise a glass and sit and stare; / understand the man.”

**

‘Ensor’s Graphic Modernism’

Where: Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and Sundays; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays

Ends: July 30

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 440-7300; www.getty.edu