We all have our obsessions. Mine are private. James Ensor, the masterfully idiosyncratic turn-of-the-century Belgian artist, has his on very public display in the Art Institute of Chicago’s winter blockbuster exhibition, “Temptation: The Demons of James Ensor.”
What was Ensor so passionate about? Light, for one. He filled his canvases with it, indoors and out. In some pictures, light is there simply to be a radiant substance, one that can as charmingly bathe two children busy at their morning toilette as it can elevate a woman eating oysters in a bourgeois dining room. A trio of gorgeous, moody landscapes of Ensor’s birthplace, the coastal town of Ostend, feel heavy and bright with the movement and luminosity of blustery, cloud-filled days.
But light for Ensor could also be allegorical. The sky could split open in a violent burst that was not just visible but Biblical: the piercing hand of God expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, the dazzling Heavens out of which Rebel Angels fall, the beam along which Jesus ascends from the cross. These pictures can be hard to look at, not just for their subject matter, which includes monstrous figures in every kind of distress, but for the way Ensor painted it. Chaos is rendered chaotically, in dense overall brushstrokes that threaten to wholly engulf the world in their tumult. Ugliness is ugly, materialized as vomiting, battling, sinful creatures that barely solidify amid the fiery muck.
How to square the artist of bourgeois domestic scenes and sensitive seaside landscapes with the painter of chaotic spiritual persecution? Add to that index accomplished still lifes, including a wonderfully weird one that sets a mask amid crustaceans and wine; small, precise etchings of ice skaters, bathing huts, and churches; and his most befuddling canvases — my favorites — dark, cartoonish scenes of people wearing carnival masks, and Ensor emerges an artist of many means, and many meanings. Then there are the nasty political caricatures, damning the heads of church, state and royal family for their oblivion to the needs of the people; the curious portraits of friends and family as insects; and the obsessive battle drawings, filled to bursting with tiny soldiers, horses, windmills and fantasy architecture. These last will be familiar to any boy with drafting abilities and a taste for the military’s particular combination of order and chaos.
Ensor was born in 1860 to an Englishman father and a Belgian mother. After studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, where he cofounded Les XX, an avant-garde exhibition society that brought Rodin, Whistler and Monet to town, he returned to Ostend and set up a studio in the attic above his mother’s shop. She ran a curio business selling shells, china, masks and Japanese prints to tourists. His younger sister Mitche, who apart from a brief marriage lived most of her life with her brother, posed for domestic scenes. His father, who died the year Ensor turned 27, appears here in a touchingly rigorous deathbed portrait.
That same year, 1887, Ensor began one of his most ambitious works. “The Temptation of Saint Anthony,” a monumental drawing nearly six feet tall, updates the story of a fourth century hermit who lived alone on a mountaintop, where he resisted an endless stream of corrupting visions through Christian faith. In Ensor’s version, the hermit must rise above the many horrors of modern-day life, as he saw them.
The Art Institute purchased the picture, which was drawn on 51 separate sheets of paper, in 2006. It was in dismal condition, having sustained damage during World War II and the alteration of controversial elements by the artist himself. It had not been publicly displayed in 60 years. The conclusion of impressive conservation efforts is the occasion for this exhibition, for the immense number of loans from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, which must be nearly empty right now, and for a number of digital display innovations that help viewers to see the drawing up close.
Because even though it is right there, on the wall, “The Temptation” remains obscure in person. It is filled from edge to edge with scene upon scene of struggle, disease, gluttony, nudity and beastliness. That much I could make out. Incidents overlap and intertwine, inciting moral vertigo and visual confusion. What to focus on, how quick to look away? Is that Christ wearing a plumed soldier’s cap? (Yes, it’s a Belgian military topper called a shako.) Is that the Virgin Mary, naked? (No, it’s Venus without her shell.) Who are those unstoppable men in tall black hats? (City merchants and city fathers, reimagined as street food vendors. Belgian fries were as tempting then as now, apparently.) What is wrong with those naked pregnant women? (Insemination by the blood of a slaughtered boar, plus tumors, warts, hysteria and more.) Why is the demon’s head exploding? (I’m still not sure, but it appears inspired by the goblins of Japanese scrolls.)
Thanks to high-resolution zoomable images and sheet-by-sheet commentary, I can decipher these details far more easily on the gallery’s large touchscreen and on my home computer than I could on the walls of the museum. “Temptation” is immense and it is hung high. The top of the picture is many feet above eye level. Colored pencil, graphite, charcoal, colored chalk and conté crayon wash out under spotlight. These are technical issues, but they are also the facts of a difficult artwork. The Art Institute meets their challenge with digital equanimity.
But “Temptation” is not just actually hard to see — it is also figuratively punishing. Its grotesque struggles overwhelm, because their density and number make them a storm impossible to weather. It’s too much to handle all at once. Split up into digital fragments, the demonically unwieldy becomes positively manageable. In doing so, the Art Institute may have invented a new form of art therapy.
“Temptation: The Demons of James Ensor” runs through January 25 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan Avenue, 312-443-3600 or artic.edu.
Lori Waxman is a special contributor to the Tribune and an instructor at the School of the Art Institute.
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