Tag Archives: James Ensor

Ravels in Review Friday Plus Banana

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It’s been a while since I did this, so check out a bounty of ravels below. Happy Friday!

  • A mention of moi? Tres cool.
  • King Lear outdoors courtesy of NY Classical Theater

*It gets stars because I like it best. (Don’t tell the others.)

Weird Earthly Delights: From Ensor to Bosch

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Ensor’s show at MoMA reminded me of yet another comparison: a similarly weird, awkwardly- figured, semi- allegorical/demonic painter: Bosch. Ensor’s work is deliberately bizarre as a method of self- fashioning, while Hieronymus Bosch– well, is anybody’s guess, but mine would be he couldn’t help himself. He was truly odd.

If you want a fun trip around the world, take Google Earth over to the Prado Museum in Spain where you can see Bosch’s masterful triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights in which a “religious” imagination runs riot.


Things are fairly normal on the left hand side, where God creates Adam and Eve. Hell is still recognizable in the right hand panel. In the center, the garden of earthly delights is full of nude cavorting men, women, birds and monsters who stick things in odd places rather than the more innocent pleasures of, say, board games and ice cream.

Check out some of Bosch’s earthly delights:


Each of these scenes are supposed to have an individual moral meaning, but they all seem centered on the pleasures of the flesh. Although the triptych form suggests it was intended as a altarpiece, the bizarre acts of the nude figures have convinced most art historians that it must have been intended for a lay person. (Or a swinging monastery perhaps??)


The difficult symbology of the central panel has often been interpreted as a warning over life’s temptations, and what a warning it is. Symbolism of this work is certainly open to interpretation and this worked in Bosch’s favor. Amazingly considering the subject matter, this panel was popular enough to generate many copies and Bosch flourished even under the sway of the Medieval Church. While I’m not sure of the particulars, I know what the works says to me:


Look at me! Look at all these happy, nude cavorting figures exploring their sexuality. What fun, with fruit and water and flowers and other naked people! This is so much more interesting than those two smaller, boring panels to the side. Wouldn’t you like to live here?

Skeletons and Masks: Ensor at MoMA

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Light, pure colors are floating, happy things until they are paradoxically combined with death. Then the light intense red become hysterical as it floats about carpets, drapes and fruit. Belgian painter James Ensor‘s works is many things, but above all he is hard to classify. Rubens, Van Gogh, William Blake, Breughel, el Dio de los Muertos, William Hogarth, Carnival and its masks…

I was swimming it an otherworldly sea of comparisons when I went to see the exhibition at MoMA yesterday. Here are some of them:

Here he poses as the Old Master painter Rubens, in a flowered and plumed hat, beginning the process of his self-fashioning, in which he gradually becomes a tormented artist plagued by thoughts of death.

Early works; Ensor’s The Drinker’s next to Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters

In these later works, both artists have shifted to pure pigment in bright, crowded interiors. Ensor has added himself as a skeleton in The Skeleton Painter.

The Fireworks doesn’t share the Biblical theme that some of Ensor’s harder to find images do with Blake, but it does share a simplicity of composition that is elemental and wondrous.
Although its hard to see the details here, Ensor’s Baths at Ostend is swarming with cavorting tiny figures rather like earlier Flemish painter Breughel’s Maypole Dance, which also takes a large, contemporary social scene as his subject before imbuing it with meaning.

You might have noticed, Ensor likes his skeletons up walking and talking or here, Skeletons Warming Themselves by the Fire. This sort of celebration of death among the living reminds me of El Dio de los Muertos both in the skeletons and the colors.

The irony of the former scene descends to pure satire in Ensor’s The Banquet of the Starving. Although the British artist William Hogarth’s The Humours of an Election was lampooning a more specific occasion, the two shared a minute dedication to attacking social and political systems.

And everywhere in Ensor, along with skeletons, you find masks. A theme throughout his life, inspired by the novelty store he lived above his whole life, here the masked people crowd around Death in Masks Confronting Death. Much good may it do them.
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On through September 21 at MoMA, check it out and see what connections you can dream up.