ENSOR EXHIBIT

The Museum of Modern Art staged a James Ensor exhibit which ends today.


I had only known Ensor as the painter of "Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889," and even that was a hint of something, rather than a full-fledged experience with the painting.


Yesterday, my friend Gary Mayer and I went down to MOMA to see the exhibit with our kids, Lola and Ava (in fifth grade together).


Ensor's famous painting was not there, but there were about 200 other pieces. Ensor had great style and form, but apparently rarely left the small city of Ostend, where he lived with his mother and extended family, on the coast of Belgium.


I am not going to be able to catalogue the exhibit, or to say what we saw in any of the other exhibits. It was too much! Even to talk about the one painting, and the preliminary drawings for it, are too much!


We got down to NYC in about 2 and a half hours, and back in about the same time. My friend Gary didn't know this route, and was astonished at the savings in time (about an hour each way).


Suffice it to say that Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 shows a commercial society in which MUSTARD is at least as important as Christ (in terms of space allotted in the painting), and one in which commercial and political values crowd out spiritual values. And yet, the notion of Christ still gives weight and value to those other things, jostling them.

Demons and angels (many rubicund and comical ones, too), competed with images of Napoleon at Waterloo, and self-portraits of Ensor wearing a flowery Flemish hat, were some images from the other canvasses.

My friend Gary Mayer -- a painter of some importance whose work has been cited in Art in America and many other vehicles -- enjoyed his visit. I did, too. Mayer can't paint full time as he did as a young man, and now that he's got a family works and works at other jobs. So this was a rare visit to a big museum.

I think he saw Ensor differently than I did. What I got out of the show is not what you're supposed to get. Most of the books argue that Ensor was not a Christian, but that he saw Christ as some kind of image of an embattled and misunderstood figure, much like himself (Christ has Ensor's features). I think however that he saw Christ as the center of all human value, but within a world that is completely foreign to the values he had come to herald. Having been crucified, I think that Christ then realized this world wasn't ready for his values, and so he said he would be right back.

Since then, people have been waiting. And theologians, like the producers of mustards and kings, and people at Carnival, are still not really ready. But if he comes, then all kinds of commercial concerns will sponsor him, such as Colman's Mustard. And many political movements will try to align themselves. So if he was to come again in Brussels in 1888, or in Delhi, in 2009, we still wouldn't be quite ready, but would still try to cash in. I think that's the joke of the painting, but it's a joke played with as much wry humor as could be mustard.

Ensor's style was Great Master level when he was 20 years old. That too is part of the joke, because the painting is painted very crudely.

And mustard SEEDS are part of the joke. But Ensor was a sublime joker, and his jokes are immensely private.

It was a weird show by a weird painter. For me the big question was: how Christian was he? Or what exactly did Christ mean to him? Jesus is in a number of the paintings, and seems to be used as a figure of high value. But putting an exact price on that value is what's hard, and I assume that every critic will have their own price that they want put on Christ's forehead, thru which in turn they can value or otherwise comprehend the paintings. Just because one of us might decide that Christ is either of infinite value, or of no value, doesn't mean that that's where Ensor placed the value. And I assume that stock prices for all figures in Ensor's life rise and fall, as they do for most. It doesn't mean that the paintings are incomprehensible, but it does make them difficult to evaluate.

What did the soup cans mean to Warhol? He claims he liked the stuff, and that he had it every day for lunch. But that doesn't mean it's not also a critique.

And yet also in itself a commercial gambit.

How do we approach Ensor and his paintings?

Warily.