The Belgian artist Luc Tuymans can without question be counted among the most significant contemporary painters. In our world of loud images, all jostling for broader attention, his oddly bleached pictures seem reticent as ghosts. Where did this eerily discomfiting vision rise from? As the Royal Academy invites Tuymans to curate a show by a fellow Belgian, born a century before him, the question receives an answer you might not expect.
In Intrigue, a concentrated display of work by James Ensor, Tuymans sets out (as he explains in a catalogue interview) to “reactivate” the work of an artist who remains marginalised in Britain despite being well recognised on the Continent — he influenced German expressionism and French surrealism, and such significant figures as Emil Nolde, Paul Klee and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner acknowledged their debt to him. However, although Tuymans insists that he wants to “minimise [his] own presence” (only a couple of his enigmatic images are included), he also casts a thought-provoking light on his own influences.
The show takes its title from the big 1890 picture by Ensor that hangs at its heart. Tuymans first encountered it in an Antwerp museum as a teenager and was immediately captivated by its aura of unease and its theatrical power. Ensor presents a garishly painted crowd of carnivalesque figures, each jostling for a place in the foreground. They are luridly costumed; their mouths gape wide and are painted lipstick bright red. Yet although it’s easy to understand why this gurning panorama of nightmarish people would capture the imagination of an adolescent, it’s harder to find in it a precursor for Tuymans’s pallid subtleties.
What is in no doubt, however, is that you are in the presence of an eccentric talent. Ensor, born in 1860 in the seaside town of Ostend, was the son of a bankrupt, alcoholic British father and a Belgian mother who ran a curio shop. He spent his childhood amid the shop’s fantastical treasures, gaudy piles of tat that lay glittering in pools of streaming sunlight. Their “opulent colours, reflections and rays of sparkling”, he later said, contributed to his becoming a painter “in love with colour” and “delighting in the blinding glow of light”.
Ensor, as a few introductory paintings make clear, began his career conventionally enough. Academically trained, he painted perfectly competent, but faintly dull domestic scenes and still lifes. You can all but smell the fustiness of the haute bourgeois parlour depicted in his 1881 Afternoon in Ostend. You have to stifle a yawn as you inhale its stultifying atmosphere.
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But notice the desperately searching look of the trussed-up young woman who sits at the tea table. She leans awkwardly forwards and catches your eye with her haunted gaze. You can’t help but feel at least a little discomfited. And it is this feeling of unease that carries the gallerygoer forward. In a show that focuses heavily on Ensor’s most productive decades — the 1880s and 1890s — he soon flees from the stifling domesticity and plunges into a far more outlandish domain.
Visitors find themselves in the company of a satirically inclined visionary. Creating a Rubens-inspired self-portrait, Ensor perches a ridiculous ladies’ flowered bonnet on his head. Paying homage to Chardin’s classic La Raie in his 1892 Skate, he depicts the poor flabby fish on the slab like a deflated cast-aside clown, his pleading smile collapsed.
Deploring bourgeois convention, in his 1889 Christ’s Entry Into Brussels he portrays himself (despite his determined atheism) as Jesus being mocked by masked revellers — although the image is represented only by an etching here, because the monumental painting (in the Getty Center in Los Angeles) is not sent out on loan. We are inside the run-amok imagination of an outsider who imagines two skeletons fighting over a pickled herring and paints a picture upon which he bestows this bizarre title.
What are you supposed to make of it? It’s hard to know, confronted by a riot of religious allegory and political satire, a danse macabre of grotesques rendered in floridly expressionistic colour and saucy seaside postcard-style line drawings that capture the follies, foibles and failings of society at leisure in rumbustious detail; copulating poodles, peeping Toms and buttocks bared by skirt-lifting breezes all included.
This masquerade is emphatically personal. It can probably most easily be described as the unbridled outpouring of the obsessive imagination of a wilfully cantankerous and notoriously complicated outsider. Among other eccentricities, Ensor would ask to reapply lipstick to his tea-sipping female visitors before they left. His tastes were wild and varied. He would adopt any style that suited, often rather clumsily. This is not the place to come if you want to see great — or often even good — painting. Yet running through his work is a disconcerting undercurrent that intrigues.
“By 1920 he was fêted and the great and good came knocking, including Albert Einstein
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There is a famous story about Ensor. By the time he was 40 this painter, still publicly deplored as scandalous, had apparently exhausted his artistic potential. Throughout the Second World War he lingered, a lonely and largely forgotten figure, in his native Ostend, stubbornly remaining there despite the high bombing risk. Then, suddenly, when the war was over, his reputation flared.
By 1920 he was the subject of big exhibitions. In 1929, as a septuagenarian, he was made a baron by the king. He was fêted and revered as Belgium’s national artist, and the great and the good came flocking to visit, including Albert Einstein.
“What do you paint?” Einstein asked him as they paced the Ostend beach. “Nothing,” replied Ensor. And this, Tuymans suggests through the curation of this show, is literally the truth. Ensor paints masks. He shows us that we are fakes, that the realities we present are paradoxically false. His spirit of nihilism reflects that of the 20th century. It speaks of the dawning sense of emptiness and alienation that haunt modernism.
The mask of pretence is the only truth there is. That is Ensor’s message. And it is the message of Tuymans too. His strange, bleached-out paintings, compiled from a host of photographic sources, show us that what we look at can’t be trusted as authentic. That is the nothingness that he too presents.
Intrigue: James Ensorby Luc Tuymans is at the Royal Academy, London W1 (020 7300 8090), to January 29