Suffering on Canvas

...The childhood pleasures Ensor derived from the contents of the family store—shellls, souvenirs, beach impedimenta, masks and curios—were offset by the unhap-piness of his early home life...

...Nevertheless, Frank Patrick Edebeau, director of the Stedelijk Museum in Ostend, tells us in the catalogue accompanying the show that he believes it was the father, described as a man of some culture, who encouraged the son to express himself—or, to put it another way, find his own form of escape...

...Considered his magnum opus, the large canvas is crammed with a carnival throng preceeding and escorting the tiny figure of Chri.-t along a boulevard hung with banners bearing such slogans as "Vive la Sociale...

...For all the invective directed at church, government and humanity in general, there is no evidence that Ensor had any religious or political convictions...

...Mitche also inspired the most moving painting in the show...

...Accounts do not specify if his father's alcoholism was the cause or the result of constant squabbling...

...But he is right at home in the 20th, epitomizing the abnormal psychology that has mesmerized this period...

...While neither Ensor nor any of the Expressionist painters ever succeeded in making pain beautiful or ugliness palatable, they have made them "interesting" by transforming them into art...

...Yet given the resemblance Farmer himself points out between Ensor and Christ in one of the crucifixion scenes, it seems quite logical to assume that the painter was expressing only his own persecution complex...

...But influences undoubtedly had difficulty penetrating the turbulence within Ensor...

...His pictures are a good example of the quietistic effects of modernism...

...Interestingly, the drawings and prints generally reveal greater control than the oils—although the figures in an 1880 piece, The Death of Jezebel, cast shadows several tones lighter than those on their bodies...

...Focusing on human afflictions, from garbage to mental derangement, modernism has unfortunately helped the world accept and even relish them...

...Possibly, then, the Belgians, who knighted, ennobled and, when the time came, gave Ensor a royal funeral, found in him a spokesman for the national character...

...Occasionally, affinities with other artists can be seen...

...The colors in the canvases of the '80s range from murky to sickly, depending on whether he was dealing with interiors or seascapes...

...One of the more grating performances is the large Rooftops of Ostend (1885), a vaguely Turner-ian panorama in misty blue-gray punctured by dabs of insistent red to denote architectural detail...

...If you plan on visiting it, though, beware: The Guggenheim is unusually strict about its hours...

...The equivalent of the French Les Independents, it nurtured native talents like Theo Van Rysselburghe and introduced the art of such innovators as Seurat and Odilon Redon...

...He was already reworking pictures in the 1880s, often adding bizarre touches like the flowered and feathered woman's hat adorning an 1883 self-portrait...

...If this critic's experience is the rule, prospective viewers will be harassed by the guards if they do not hurry out promptly, 15 minutes before the advertised closing time...

...Surely, however, it was of no help to a boy outnumbered by troubled females: The household featured a complaining mother, a hypochondriacal aunt and an unstable younger sister...

...For, on the one hand, it has been gallant little Belgium, the inevitable victim of big powers in big wars...

...A contemporary of Munch and Freud, the artist is best known for his pictures of masked carnival crowds and a Boschian view of humanity...

...It can be argued that Belgium's contributions to Surrealism—Delvaux and Magritte were also born there—is not accidental...

...Even the very earliest pieces are anxiety-ridden, an effect produced by the handling of the paint...

...That his fears were groundless merely underscores the pathological nature of Ensor's art: He attracted attention as soon as he began exhibiting and, while no stranger to rejection, had a show in every year but one of the decade-long career of the group known as I^es Vingts...

...When Impressionism surfaces—high-keyed and pink-toned—in some of the still lifes of the 1890s, it is soon overwhelmed by the artist's neuroses...

...Opiate may not be the right word, yet there are times when it is difficult to deny the anesthetic part of esthetics...

...A firmly composed, rapidly painted work, it is one of the few times Ensor transcended his own problems long enough to reveal someone else's tragic inner world...

...The artist was a founding member of this organization, which played a leading part in the development of Belgian modernism...

...This is particularly true of The Entry of Christ into Brussels (1882...

...She stares with palpable desperation at the sunlight she cannot enjoy...

...Although his work is too idiosyncratic to be classified incipient Expressionism or Surrealism, it certainly paved the way for both movements, as the current exhibit at the Guggenheim (through April 11) testifies...

...In those first, academic paintings, he oscillated between overworking the pigment in small strokes and distractedly smearing it on with a knife...

...The picture, peppered with red shapes, is wildly satirical, though of what is uncertain...

...There are some noteworthy copies of studies by Rembrandt, Goya and Delacroix, and an impressive etching of a cathedral towering over a vast crowd...

...One or two of the early interiors in the show suggest Vuillard...

...In any event, James did not do well in school and quit at age IS to take lessons from local artists before going off to complete his training at the Beaux-Arts Academie...

...Such thoughts are inevitable upon exposure to Ensor's ghouls scrabbling at carcasses and his anally-obsessed demons...

...The young woman, having flung herself on a bed, her hat tossed on the floor, lies beside a window whose curtains are drawn...

...Her featureless head, no more than a blot, is turned toward another window in front of her...

...The best graphic on display is a lovely line drawing of the artist's sister, "Mitche," engrossed in writing a letter, her hair falling over her face...

...At the outset Ensor was prolific...

...In this way, artists have unwittingly collaborated with the media in the drive to dull our sensibilities...

...Straightforwardly drawn (Ensor was a fine draftsman), the building seems to swell, as if about to explode...

...It seems appropriate that so contradictory a country should have produced an art rich in strange juxtapositions...

...Then, after gaining critical and financial success, he more or less dried up around World War I and, according to art historian Werner von Haftmann, was seized by the compulsion to repaint his most famous works from memory...

...This "menopause" theory is much too facile, though: Ensor's malaise predates his middle age by a considerable number of years...

...Supposedly Ensor was deeply concerned with fight, but his mental turmoil absorbed him too much to allow a thorough analysis of its possibilities...

...Except for three years of study in Brussels and a few brief trips abroad, the lifelong bachelor lived with his family, whose existence revolved around a novelty shop that presumably was its main source of support...

...he did the bulk of his work—as well as the best of it—prior to his 50s...

...On the other hand, it has until recently held its own as one of the richer colonial nations and continues to be a prime arms manufacturer...

...Some say this proves that his psychological decline did not begin until relatively late in life, a reasonable enough conclusion if one focuses just on the subject matter...

...John David Farmer, former Curator of Earlier Painting at the Art Institute of Chicago (whence the exhibit originated) suggests in his catalogue essay that for the artist Christ represented "the nobler side of man's nature, that very quality that [he] saw society destroying...

...Many of his pictures confront the human condition in a confused way...

...The artist's first comprehensive show in 25 years, comprising about 200 paintings, drawings and engravings, is worth seeing to understand how deeply the abnormal has embedded itself into our art...

...Ensor tried, unsuccessfully I think, to universalize his suffering...

...The painter created largely during the 19th century...