The Scandalous Art of James Ensor

Ensor imagines a vast, teeming crowd pushing toward the viewer in a disconcerting procession that weirdly blends elements of official civic and military parades, political protests, solemn religious displays, and riotous carnival celebrations. 

Alongside a skinny civic official, clownish figures in wildly colorful costumes trumpet Ensor’s delight in carnival themes and the popular theatrical tradition of commedia dell’arte. 

The artist and his avant-garde contemporaries saw these itinerant performers as wise fools existing on the social margins who were free to mock the world and reflect on the human condition.

The anti-authoritarian Ensor had little respect for ruling institutions, presenting the members of this military marching band as vacuous puppets, by turns comic and sinister. 

Near the center, the general’s yellow uniform is plastered with medals, but his red, bulbous nose and puffy face suggest an undisciplined drunkard, not a commander.

Ensor’s self-portraits range from the satirical to the macabre. With humor and irony, he often attacked his critics or portrayed himself as a victim of their assaults. Posturing as a persecuted, visionary artist even led Ensor to identify with Christ. 

The resemblance of Christ’s face here to Ensor’s has been much remarked. Trumpeting Ensor's sense of self-importance, the monumental painting references the biblical story of Christ's triumphal entrance into Jerusalem shortly before the Crucifixion.

Occupying the center of the picture, Jesus is nevertheless presented as a diminished figure who is practically lost amid a crowd that largely ignores him—perhaps signaling the painter’s own feelings of social and artistic isolation.

Ensor may have identified personally with Christ, but he freely attacked the institution of the Church. He casts a roly-poly bishop as a clownish, baton-wielding drum major leading the military marching band—a cynical allusion to the close political alliance between the Belgian monarchy and the conservative Catholic Party in the 1880s.

This placard’s message translates as "Dogmatic Fanfares [are] Always Successful.” It cynically conveys Ensor’s fervent individualism and skepticism of institutional power, dogma, and party politics. The message is an ironic comment on the various other contending "fanfares" in the painting, from "Vive la Sociale" to "Vive Jesus."

Ensor’s native Ostend, Belgium was host to a famous carnival, and celebrants descending annually on the seaside resort town bought masks from his family’s souvenir shop. This face of a shrewish woman in blue glasses is evidently based on one he kept in his studio, as she appears repeatedly in his work.

These two grimacing masks at the far right evoke the highly stylized, grotesque forms of Japanese Noh theater. Ensor joined in the Japanese art craze of late 19th-century Europe, eagerly studying the imports stocked in his family’s souvenir shop. Such “exotic” sources encouraged Ensor to exaggerate form and color in his art and to boldly defy conventional Western notions of beauty.