As you look closer, Ensor’s chaotic abstraction transforms into a dynamic battle scene between good and evil.
James Ensor, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1889, oil on canvas, 108.8 x 132.8 cm (Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp). Speakers: Dr. Herwig Todts, Senior Research Curator, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp and Dr. Beth Harris
VISITFLANDERS has joined forces with Smarthistory and the Center for Netherlandish Art at the MFA Boston to bring you a series of video conversations with curators on important Flemish paintings by artists such as Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, Peter Paul Rubens, and James Ensor.
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0:00:04.9 Dr. Beth Harris: We’re standing in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, in front of a painting by James Ensor, “The Fall of the Rebel Angels.” This is a painting that requires close looking.
0:00:17.0 Dr. Herwig Todts: It almost seems an abstract, informal, expressionist painting. It seems a sort of chaotic image with patches of color, and you have to get close to recognize legs and arms and demons flying, angels flying. And slowly you will discover, for instance, the dragon with its seven heads who is fighting with the archangel, and you will see a group of masked figures celebrating carnival. And then in the lower right, you have an almost apocalyptic scene with nudes that are drowning, and then you have to move back to see that we have a seascape, and it’s above this seascape in the sky that this chaotic, violent event is taking place.
0:01:11.1 Dr. Harris: A battle in heaven between the forces of good and the forces of evil. This is drawn from the Hebrew Bible, from the Christian Bible, specifically the book of Revelation, but in a way those forces are not what Ensor is interested in.
0:01:27.2 Dr. Todts: Ensor was not a religious person. He did not believe in God and Christ. He was intrigued by Christ. He was intrigued by all these late medieval representations of heaven and hell, and like most modern artists and modern audience, he was fascinated by demons and by getting driven by your impulses, by lust, by greed. He is fascinated and obsessed with evil. Why are we evil? How can men on the one hand be rational and at the same time be cruel? And that explains, I think to a certain extent, a painting such as The Fall of the Rebel Angels, because it’s a pessimistic view of the world and of mankind.
0:02:18.3 Dr. Harris: And as you look closer and closer, different heads and faces emerge, weapons, and then interestingly, this green banner with two Xs, that is the symbol for Les Vingt, the avant-garde artist’s organization that Ensor was a leading member of, although he also had his disagreements with them.
0:02:41.7 Dr. Todts: You have this almost provocation with Les Vingt, referring to this group as a sort of group of carnival celebrators. He could be very provocative, challenging his best friends to see, how far can I go?
0:03:00.9 Dr. Harris: Well, those were artists who were asserting an avant-garde status, for example, Fernand Khnopff, but whose work looks to me so conservative next to a painting as expressive, as violent in its brushwork as this one. And yet, it’s not as though everything here is spontaneous. This is a very careful composition.
0:03:21.3 Dr. Todts: And when you look very closely, you will see that almost all the figures have been prepared with a thin, bluish underpainting, just indicating here will I have a carriage, there I will have another figure, there I will have a mask. So, it’s a very well-prepared sort of chaos.
0:03:45.3 Dr. Harris: So many layers upon layers of paint, and yet at the same time, areas where the paint is thin and we can see the canvas beneath it.
0:03:53.3 Dr. Todts: And here and there, it seems that he might have simply tried to turn an informal patch into a figure, a mask, a face. But as a whole, it’s indeed very well prepared. What is the most important characteristic of Ensor is that he dared to be very radical. If we’re going to do something like Hieronymus Bosch, but in a modern way, this is what I propose. He used different sources. For instance, this composition comes from John Martin, and the colors and the technique comes from the French Impressionists.
0:04:31.9 Dr. Harris: The Impressionist interest in Parisian leisure couldn’t be further from the kind of grandiose vision that Ensor had for his own art.
0:04:41.5 Dr. Todts: Once again, he turns it into something so different that has indeed nothing to do with this optimistic Impressionist world where we all would like to live. But Ensor is almost telling us, that is not the real world. The real world is about evil. It’s a painting where evil is very strong and present, and what he tries to do is turn this chaotic evil into something that is so spectacular that you get carried away, indeed, in a sort of blissful ecstasy, in a sort of blissful aesthetic experience.
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