Ensor's Prints James Ensor

Belgian, 1860-1949

by Stephen Goddard

James Ensor is best known for his paintings of masks and skeletons, and for his monumental painting of 1888, The Entry of Christ into Brussels (now in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California). This work has often been seen as Ensor's answer to Seurat's La Grande Jatte, which had been exhibited the previous year with the progressive exhibition society in Brussels, Les XX ("The Twenty"). In Ensor's painting The Entry of Christ into Brussels, and in most of his biblical images (including the "Descent into Limbo" seen here), there is little doubt that the figure of Christ is a self-portrait of the artist. This notion is extensively explored in Stephen McGough's study.

Ensor was also a prolific printmaker. More than half of his total output of 133 etchings was produced between 1886 and 1891. His fascination with printmaking is wonderfully expressed in two statements by the artist. In a well known letter of 1934 he wrote to Albert Croquez about his turning to etching in 1886, at the age of twenty-six (this translation is based in part on Lesko's translation, p. 43):

Pictorial materials still worry me (in 1886). I dread the fragility of painting, exposed to the crimes of the restorer, to insufficiency, to the slander of reproductions. I want to survive, to speak to the people of tomorrow for a long time yet. I think of solid copper plates, of unalterable inks, of easy reproductions, of faithful printing, and I am adopting etching as a means of expression.

Several years later Ensor wrote to his friend Emma Lambotte:

I am so pleased that you think well of my etchings. I have signed and dated them for your pleasure. In looking at the dates you can see that 1888 was an especially fecund, happy period of walks in the open air, punctuated with the delicious work of the etcher. Nature seemed beautiful and kind.

In addition to his preoccupations with mortality, the macabre, and human folly, Ensor as also deeply concerned with the nature of light and the marine world he encountered in his native Ostend on the coast of the North Sea. Goddard has summarized (pp. 84-85):

Ensor's visionary world was permeated with a scintillating, particulate light, not the light of the impressionists whom he called "superficial daubers suffused with traditional recipes," but with light in its physical particulate nature and in its metaphorical role. His concern with light was in many ways analogous, at least in sensory terms, to his other great love, the briny, granular atmosphere laden with smells that he knew from his home on the coast of Belgium, and about which he wrote with such passion, "The Flemish sea gives me all its nacreous fires, and I embrace it every morning, noon, and night. Ah, the wonderful kisses of my beloved sea, sublimated kisses, sandy, perfumed with foam, refreshingly pungent." (as translated in Chipp, p. 112)

Some useful texts on Ensor:

Chipp, Hershel B., Theories of Modern Art, A Source Book by Artists and Critics. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1968, pp. 109-114.
Goddard, Stephen, ed., Les XX and The Belgian Avant-Garde: Prints, Drawings, and Books ca. 1890. Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, 1992.
Hoozee, Robert, Sabine Bown-Taevernier, and J.F. Heijbroeck, James Ensor, Dessins et Estampes, Antwerp (Fonds Mercator), 1987.
Lesko, Diane, James Ensor, the Creative Years, Princeton, New Jersey (Princeton University Press), 1985.
McGough, Stephen C., James Ensor's "The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889" (doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, 1981), Outstanding Dissertations in the Fine Arts, New York, Garland, 1985.
Paris, Petit Palais, James Ensor, 1990.
Taevernier, Auguste, James Ensor, Catalogue illustré de ses gravures, leur description critique et l'inventaire des plaques, Ghent (N.V. Erasmus Ledeberg), 1973.