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THE WITTY, UGLY PAINTINGS OF JAMES ENSOR

A critical figure in the Belgian avant-garde from 1880 to the mid-1890s, James Ensor is the subject of a retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern art (through September 21st). For most museum-goers, the event will seem like something out of left field. Ensor is a fantastic painter with a sharp wit, but his work can be hard to swallow. It's ugly at first glance. And it's conspicuous.

Critics seem to know better. Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for the New Yorker, raved about the event, noting that the Ensor bonanza "will affect many viewers like the detonation of a bomb whose fuse has been fizzing inconspicuously for a century." Holland Cotter thought the painter "as much a visionary as van Gogh and a far more imaginative neurotic than Edvard Munch."

Ensor made paintings, drawings and prints--lots of them. His lifelong obsessions, according to the show, were "himself, the sea, light" and death. The subjects of Ensor's early paintings are conventional. There are still-lifes, portraits, depictions of afternoon tea. The paintings have a proficient but dreary appearance. Gradually--and then speedily--the works begin to vibrate with the painter's oddball energy and curious use of colour. In his 1908 monograph on the artist, Émile Verhaeven wrote that Ensor's colour was "divided, disseminated, sown" rather than "distributed in large areas".

Leaps in technique were followed by leaps in subject matter, and things got weird as Ensor matured. "Children Dressing" (1886) has two skinny kids of indeterminate gender posing nude in a boudoir; paintings of fireworks and sketches of hippogriffs soon follow, as well as a new theory of painting that involves experimental renditions of light. A coloured-pencil sketch of Jesus replaces "INRI" with "ENSOR". It's a piece that wouldn't be out of place at the New Museum's recent "Younger Than Jesus" exhibition of ascendant young artists.

With an aesthetic that tends toward the ghoulish, Ensor isn't for everyone. He's probably, in fact, for the very few. As Cotter put it, the show will appeal to "anyone trying to negotiate an insider-outsider perch, anyone obsessed by violence and light, anyone who knows that loony is relative, that art is reality seen from a high small place, that the distance from a joke to a shock to a prayer is short."

James Ensor at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (until September 21st)

~ MOLLY YOUNG

Picture credit: "Self-Portrait with Masks" (1899), Menard Art Museum, Komaki City