Four Artists' Studios

Abstract

Four Artists' Studios Ronald Paulson (bio) Over the past year, 2008–2009, there have been four significant exhibitions in New York—James Ensor at MoMA and Francis Bacon, Georgio Morandi, and Pierre Bonnard at the Metropolitan Museum. What the four painters—admittedly very disparate, Anglo-Belgian and Anglo-Irish, Italian and French—share is a hermetic studio, out of which they seldom ventured for inspiration. They used the materials they found or collected inside their studios—not the contingent, un-selected world outside—as the subject of their art. Ensor's studio (1880s–1949) was the attic of the building in Ostend in which he and his family—English father, Belgian mother—lived; underneath the living quarters was their antique shop. Extracted from the shop, cluttering the studio, were Carnival masks, human skulls, stuffed fish, seashells, old books, prints piled up on chairs, china, cups, pots, and worn-out rugs littering the floor. The walls were covered with Ensor's paintings of the same. All of this served as subject matter for the larger part of Ensor's oeuvre (he liked to paint and have himself photographed in his studio, "my favorite room"). He painted the occasional landscape and cityscape, the latter seen from his windows, but his reputation is based on the contents of his studio. Ensor inaugurated his career with huge graphite drawings (the equivalent of conventional history paintings) of religious subjects, primarily the sufferings of Christ, leading up to the eight-by-fourteen foot painting, The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 (Getty Museum, not in the show). The Entry has Christ surrounded by Carnival masks dredged from the antique shop, which update the equally distorted faces of Christ Mocked and Ecce Homo paintings by his Flemish forebears Bosch and Brueghel. Ensor's aim, reacting to his rejection by the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, was to parody and correct those official "Joyous Entry" paintings, scenes of heroes or victors or monarchs, Charles V and others, entering Brussels in triumph. With this painting he attempted to modernize Flemish art and, at the same time, bring Christ into collision with contemporary Belgium. But, closer to the ethos of his attic studio, at the center of the crowd he has replaced Christ's face with his own. Throughout his career he identified himself with such iconic figures, garnered from the objects in his studio, whether masks, pictures of Christ, or human skulls. From then on, keeping this huge canvas on one wall of his studio, he painted relatively small canvases, many of which he displayed on the [End Page 122] other walls. He reduced the huge history paintings to the modest still life and made the masks and costumes essential objects arranged on a table. These are not literal copies of masks (like those the Tiepolos painted in their Venetian Carnival scenes) but variations in which—grotesquely, in the original sense of that word—mask and human, animal and vegetable, meld. But they continue to tell the story of Christ Mocked in place of the mocking faces with Carnival masks. A middle face, sometimes unmasked, sometimes yet another mask, is mocked by masks on either side. Mostly this is Ensor the artist, in the position of Christ; or he is only a skull, balanced precariously atop a contemporary suit of clothes (or, in Ensor in 1964, merely an outstretched skeleton). Or Ensor gives himself the hat of a Rubens self-portrait, drawing attention to their similar beards, to stand out, as the beautiful face of Jesus stood out, amid the grotesque heads of the Bosch and Brueghel mockers. Or he shows himself, or a friend, playing Pierrot, alluding to his eighteenth-century countryman Watteau's painting of Pierrot surrounded by the other commedia dell'arte players in an Ecce Homo composition (Washington, National Gallery). Ensor mixes the conventions of commedia and Carnival, both in place of the moribund iconography of religion. Ensor tells us how all those objects in the antique shop terrified him as a child; he recalls the "strange stuffed animals and terrible savage weapons." His inner, or studio, plot is the infantile one of paranoia, which he renders sometimes with a rich...