James Ensor, The Intrigue

0:00:04.9 Dr. Beth Harris: We’re in the galleries at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, and we’re standing in front of a painting by James Ensor, The Intrigue. Ensor referred to himself as “the painter of masks.”

0:00:18.4 Dr. Herwig Todts: “Le peintre des masques,” “the painter of masks.” And he was very proud of being that. Now, what is peculiar about the way he uses masks is that he does not use it as a sort of instrument of disguise. People are not hiding themselves behind the mask to pretend that they’re someone else. No, he’s sort of revealing with these masks, the true nature of the characters he’s showing.

0:00:49.5 Dr. Harris: Our eye immediately goes to the man in this very tall top hat in the center.

0:00:55.1 Dr. Todts: Apparently intrigue in the celebration of carnival in Belgium and France is a moment when disguised carnival celebrators are allowed to mock someone and to make fun of his or her bad or stupid behavior. So in this case, it seems that the man with the high hat is the one who is mocked, who is satirized. But what is intriguing is that on the one hand you have his partner, a woman with a hat, and with flowers. Is she his wife or his lover, or might she be a prostitute because of the hat with flowers? We’re not sure. But in front of this man is another woman, and she carries on her shoulder a baby, which in fact is a Japanese doll, and she’s pointing at him as if she is accusing him. Might he be the father of this child? Is that what is revealed here?

0:02:01.8 Dr. Harris: What’s so fascinating to me is that we have this male figure in a mask who’s dressed up in maybe a shabby version of a nice coat and a scarf, and this very serious top hat, and the figure seems to be taken aback.

0:02:17.3 Dr. Todts: Well, his expression is reserved, shy, and we cannot really define what is going on in his head. Is he afraid, surprised? Because all the others mock him and laugh and even seem threatening, but he’s almost hiding in his coat.

0:02:36.7 Dr. Harris: And that female figure who has her right arm on his. She’s overdressed with this flowered hat and maybe flowers at the center of her jacket, and Ensor painted her in this lavish way where we see all of these beautiful brushstrokes of greens and whites and golds, and then the red of her face and those lips that look like they have lipstick on.

0:03:01.6 Dr. Todts: One of the reasons Ensor was attracted by masks was on the one hand, these extreme expressions, which he loved, but on the other hand, the colors. He, as so many European artists, discovered bright colors in the paintings of the French Impressionists, and he fell in love with the technique. But immediately he started to work with different themes with irrational, grotesque motifs. And he turns color, which he took from the French Impressionists, into another expressive vehicle. But he’s in between realist use of color and light and form even, and a very expressive use of color and form.

0:03:50.2 Dr. Harris: It was so important for him to work against what he called a kind of banality.

0:03:56.3 Dr. Todts: Exactly. He would do anything to avoid banality.

0:04:00.3 Dr. Harris: I’m reminded of how you’ve written about Ensor looking for ecstasy, for bliss, for something that rises above the world that we can see.

0:04:12.5 Dr. Todts: Well, even as a painter of realist marines and still lives, he was already attracted and searching for what he himself called a sort of splendid chaos. A delightful chaos.

0:04:27.1 Dr. Harris: In the upper right corner, we see a skull-like mask, and we know that skulls often appear in Ensor’s work.

0:04:35.2 Dr. Todts: We might say that Ensor’s view of the world and of mankind and even of himself was to a certain extent pessimistic. But he always combines this pessimistic view with humor, and it always turns into something grotesque, which is on the one hand, scary and pessimistic. But on the other hand, funny is something you should laugh about.

0:05:00.8 Dr. Harris: With Ensor, we have an artist who is, it seems to me so brave, so true to himself, to his individual vision.

0:05:09.8 Dr. Todts: He did a lot of different things. He painted bourgeois interiors, he painted marines, he painted landscapes. He made a lot of etchings. He made big drawings.

0:05:20.0 Dr. Harris: Religious subjects.

0:05:21.5 Dr. Todts: Exactly. I think he was well aware that at the end of the 19th century in Belgium, he was the most talented and the bravest. Of course, there were many talented artists by the end of the 19th century in Belgium, such as Theo van Rysellberghe or Fernand Khnopff or George Minne. But Ensor knew, and he was right, that he was the most talented and the bravest. He dared to go when no one else went.

0:05:52.9 Dr. Harris: And if we think about this composition, which at first seems very odd, there actually is a precedent.

0:06:00.2 Dr. Todts: And the precedent is a painting by Rubens that Ensor might well have known through a reproduction. And it’s The Woman in Adultery, and it is almost exactly the same composition: half-length figures, very expressive faces, and all these gestures, the one point to another. Now, what I find once again intriguing is that the Rubens’s painting is a painting about the woman in adultery. While this intrigue might very well be the representation of a man in adultery.

0:06:36.4 Dr. Harris: Ensor is thinking about art history, but doing what he wants with it.

0:06:41.7 Dr. Todts: Who would think of Rubens in front of this painting? He was fearless. He did whatever he thought that one might do, just to try to get as close as he could to this ideal of splendid chaos.