Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888), James Ensor
Very sensitive to criticism, Ensor appeared hurt, disappointed and despairing after the Salon des XX in 1887 and his confrontation with Seurat’s enormous painting. During that same year, he had to cope with the deaths of his father and his grandmother, to whom he was very attached. These events had a profound effect on Ensor and led to a turning point in his career.
From 1887, images of masks and skeletons, already present throughout his work since 1883, became prominent. He even went back to some of his works from the early 1880s to add in these motifs.
Masks and skeletons of course recalled the strange atmosphere of the family shop as well as the Carnival tradition of Ostend, but they also had a symbolic meaning. Masks concealed and heightened a reality that the painter found too ugly and too cruel, while skeletons pointed to the vanity and absurdity of the world.
In 1888, Ensor tackled the monumental Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (2,52 x 4,3 m., Los Angeles, The Paul Getty Museum), his response to Seurat’s painting and to the detractors of his work. This painting blends all the principles of Ensor’s art: light that intensifies the most vivid colours, the desire for modernity that places Christ in 19th century Brussels, a city torn by conflicting political movements, and masks that confuse reality, the very apotheosis of the painter. Ensor gave his own features to Christ entering Brussels, as if sacrificing his life and his peace of mind to painting.
At the same time as working on his programmatic painting, Ensor took his revenge for the attacks directed at him, with a series of virulent panels, engravings and drawings denouncing the injustices of his time as well as expressing his own petty concerns. The viciousness and lack of constraint of these works were unequalled in these final years of the century.
– Musée d’Orsay
Masks Confronting Death (1888), James Ensor
Ensor had been surrounded by masks all his life.His parents ran a souvenir shop in the seaside town of Ostend, Belgium, where they displayed masks, puppets, chinoiseries, sea- shells, and similar curiosities, all of which caught the imagination of the young Ensor and subsequently ap- peared in his paintings. In addition, Ensor participated in the extravagant carnivals of Ostend and Brussels, and the masked and costumed revelers impressed him strongly. He saw with clarity the difference between the pretences of carnival and the realities of human existence.
By 1888 he felt no necessity for the human presences and realistic settings of his earlier compositions with masks; he had developed the mask into an effective carrier of meaning within an imaginary pictorial world.
In Masks Confronting Death, five masked merrymakers are shown half- length in the foreground beneath a luminous sky, cluster- ing around the costumed figure of Death in a symbolic confrontation. The masks have a shocking intensity. One has unnaturally wide, staring eyes, others grotesquely shaped noses and senselessly grinning mouths, one a flamelike topknot of blue hair
Although masks usually transform or conceal the wearer, these masks of Ensor’s seem instead to gather into themselves all the malignities of the beings they purport to disguise. Their grotesqueness seems a physical manifestation of a deformed human soul beneath. They reveal Ensor’s view of humankind, with its weaknesses and cruelties. He feels no compassion for these distorted creatures; his own bitter encounters with a family who plagued him and with art critics who ridiculed his work left him no tolerance for human folly.
Much of the shock of these masked presences is due to Ensor’s use of color. The shimmering pastels of sky, and some costumes and hats, show the influence of the luminous palettes of Watteau, Turner,and the Impressionists, and perhaps of the nacreous colorings of the marine creatures Ensor painted at Ostend. But for the masks and the rest of the costumes Ensor has used bold expressionistic colour,crudely applied vivid red, bright blue,and brilliant shiny pinks for the faces, set against the harsh red, yellow, and green and the vulgar iridescences of carnival costumes. These bold colors violate the softer colors in his canvas, and become in themselves a metaphor for the violence Ensor sees in the masks, and in mankind.
Death too is a frequent inhabitant of Ensor’s pictorial world. As the masks reveal what men are, Death shows what they shall become. With sardonic humor Ensor sends him among the masqueraders, denying them the escape from reality that they seek in their revels.
A fantastical figure, prominent in his shimmering white robe against the colored garments of the crowd, Death wears an elaborate and disturbingly organic-looking hat, with a yellow flower clinging to it. Although the revelers are gathered around him, it is possible that in their folly they have not yet recognized him as other than a cos- tumed carnivalfigure likethemselves. The loose shoulders of his robe and the downturned hatbrim shield his face from their scrutiny. The cowering figure at the far left, seeming to gnaw on the cloak of the figure in front of him in his fright, may understand the seriousness of the en- counter, and his fear is echoed inthe disembodied, ghostly features in blue in the mists above his head. The viewer, for his part, is certainly not misled; the skull stares directly out of the picture, the gray-brown color of decay, drawing him into the circle of those under Death’s power.
– Cynthia Johnson, Ensor’s “Masks Confronting Death”, MoMA, No. 5 (Autumn, 1975), p. 3
Multiple Identities of a Face 