Exhibitions

Theatre of Masks

(Barbican Art Gallery, till 14 December)

A bit of a mess

Martin Gayford

An exhibition, ideally, should be the strongest possible display of an artist's work. That simple dictum, once put to me by a painter friend, seems obvious. But — for various reasons — it doesn't always turn out like that. Sadly, the James Ensor exhibition, Theatre of Masks, at the Barbi- can is a demonstration of what can go wrong when the emphasis falls not on the strongest work, but far too often on the weakest.

Ensor (1860-1949) was a unique and fas- cinating talent, and his career proceeded in an accordingly unconventional fashion. Broadly speaking, he started off as a som- bre realist. In those early years his most memorable pictures were claustrophobic bourgeois interiors, over-furnished rooms in which his female relations sit or lie and a miasma of ennui fills the air. At this stage, you might say, Ensor was a more heavy- handed Vuillard, plus angst.

Then, in his middle twenties, Ensor's work began to change. Carnival masks and skeletons started to invade, often in a strangely literal fashion — because he was in the habit of reworking earlier, more con- ventional canvases to introduce bizarre additions. (Masks were part of the stock of the Ensor family knick-knack shop — the carnival at Ostend, where they lived, being a major local event.) From being a realist, he had become a variety of proto-Surrealist — a Surrealist who was at the same time a savagely scatological satirist of the world around him; an antic, manic, isolated fig- ure.

Then, apparently in despair at the lack of recognition he suffered, he laid aside his brushes for a year. When he took them up again in 1895, much of the tension and energy had seeped from his work. And after 1900, as he gradually won that recog- nition, virtually all the excitement had gone. He continued to work away tranquil- ly and fruitlessly until he was almost 90, dying a Belgian baron and national hero.

This extraordinary pattern of develop- ment is effectively obliterated by the Barbi- can show, in which one finds work from the 1930s hung side by side with pieces from the 1880s. Only the alert and informed visi- The Dangerous Cooks', 1883 'Ensor with Flowered Hat', 1896 tor, therefore, will be able to understand what was really going on. The hanging at the Barbican is not chronological, but vaguely thematic — except that it sort of sets off with early work, and ends up with an entire room of boring late stuff. So the hanging isn't completely anything, apart from a mess.

That's one problem. Another is that for some reason the exhibition is overbur- dened — lumbered might be a better word — with far too much of the post-1900 work, and far too many second-rate bits of Ensor altogether. There are corresponding- ly few of his truly striking pieces. In partic- ular, the magnificent 'Entry of Christ into Brussels', 1889, from the Getty Museum is missing, without which any Ensor exhibi- tion will look a little lame. Also, of the important early realist interiors there are only two. And of the key dead head and mask paintings — the heart of Ensor's achievement — there are very few first- class specimens.

The absences are more excusable than the presences. It is difficult to arrange loans of major pictures (though the Ensor exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris seven years ago was a far fuller and more satis- factory affair). But if it was impossible to get most of the important pictures, it would have been better to spread out the rest more widely, or have a smaller show, rather than pad it out with dross.

The catalogue introduction argues, weakly, that late Ensor isn't as bad as is generally thought, or not quite so bad. But the vapid pastel evidence on the walls is that it definitely is. He was clearly copying himself. There are grounds to suspect that this show is out to make art historical points. One is about the not-so-badness of later Ensor. Another is about the influence on Ensor — whose father was English — of English art. This is perfectly true, but halfway through the show it leads to an outbreak of Turnerian landscapes which are not among Ensor's most characteristic or interesting paintings. There are in fact, spaced out here and there, enough out- standing Ensors on show to make a visit worthwhile — provided the visitor is fore- warned and knows what to look for. Among the realist paintings, 'The Lady in Distress' of 1882 is outstanding, showing in all probability the painter's sister Mitche, languishing on an ornate bed in a darkened room. Like her brother, she seems to have seethed with frustration and discontent in the family home in Ostend. Eventually, she ran away with a Chinese commercial trav- eller, only to return pregnant a little later. Ensor himself never left or married, and continued to live in the parental nest until his death.

Next to 'The Lady in Distress' is the mar- vellous Ensor with Flowered Hat' — but although it was started at the same time as the 'Lady', the celebrated self-portrait is actually a very different work. It began in the early 1880s as a straightforward image in which the painter confronts the world with a sensitive, gently reproving look. But some time later, he added an extraordinary flowered and feathered hat in the 17th-cen- tury manner. The effect is gloriously absurd: the poetic, fin de siècle artist guying himself.

There are also some good early still lives (hanging next to some feeble late ones) and a good array of the prints and graphic work — but the latter, intrinsically small- scale and reticent, will not engage the interest of a visitor not already fired by the paintings. Of the grotesque carnival paint- ings, the best are 'Masks Watching a Negro Bargeman' and 'Old Woman with Masks'. Both of these are cases where a relatively conventional earlier picture — a life study and a commissioned portrait — have been infiltrated by a crowd of sneering, grinning revellers.

Perhaps the category of Ensor best rep- resented is his satire — possibly derived from Gilray. For a while, he excoriated the Establishment with passion. Generals, roy- alty and ecclesiastics excrete copiously onto the populace from a great height. Judges are so corrupt that clouds of flies emerge from their open mouths, doctors drag out their patients' intestines. (Later, when he joined the Establishment himself, Ensor tried to destroy some of these images.) What was eating Ensor? The masks are, among other things, emblems of alienation: cruel and hypocritical humanity seen by an outsider. In the 1880s, Ensor had many reasons to feel cut off. His work, even of the early realist type, was reviled. He was described as a madman. He was trapped in a suffocating family house, in which his cul- tivated English father had become a hope- less alcoholic, despised by his mother. He had the standard leftist political idealism of the young.

Whatever it was that drove him to frantic imaginative extremes in those years, it made him a much more important and exciting artist than this exhibition suggests.