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       ‘Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring’ (1891) – James Ensor

Earlier this month I got the chance to check out Luc Tuymans’s exhibition of James Ensor’s work at the Royal Academy of the Arts. I’d been excited to see this exhibition for quite some time. Ensor is one of my favourite artists, a true innovator whose work defies easy categorization. He might have been an expressionist before expressionism, but he was more than that as well. 

I was also excited to see this exhibit because Ensor’s work is not easy to find. Much of it is held in private collections or in museums in Belgium. Here are some quick thoughts on the exhibition: 

1. Some of my favourite works by Ensor, including Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring and The Skeleton Painter, are tiny. They also sparkle. Ensor must’ve used some sort of glitter in some of the paints and it provides an eery juxtaposition to the otherwise macabre content. 

2. Belgium was the most densely populated European country at the turn of the twentieth century. The theme of masses, crowds, overpopulation feature prominently in some of Ensor’s works, including the comical The Baths at Ostend. 

3. I was a bit disappointed by the fact that Ensor’s most famous work, The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889, was absent. There was an etching of the piece, but nothing compares to the canvas. I guess they couldn’t pry it away from the Getty Museum.