I spent some time wandering the streets and museums of Paris just before Christmas, and stumbled upon a really intriguing exhibition on Belgian artist James Ensor at the Musée d’Orsay. There are many popular and beautiful pieces at this museum from the likes of Gauguin, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Van Gogh, Vuillard, etc., but I really only cared to see Ensor for some reason. It was a crowded Saturday afternoon and I generally dislike the crowds on these days (much like it is in NYC), but I waded through layers upon layers of sleepy, hushed bodies and waited patiently to get a glimpse at every piece they’d included in the exhibit.

When I was in college, I somehow landed a part-time job in the school’s art history library, where I catalogued, cleaned and repaired slides while listening to the graduate students gossip about most things and people under the sun. I was lucky to learn a little about lesser known artists (for those of us who haven’t studied much art history), including James Ensor. While I’d taken a couple of art history courses in college, and in retrospect, wish that I’d at least minored in the subject, his work really captivated me, and I can’t remember giving it much thought again until I stumbled upon the Musée d’Orsay exhibition.

Life is strange in the way that it sometimes seems to come full circle, drudging up certain memories that trigger even others, and so on.

Ensor was a strange and enigmatic painter, known for his skeletal images, quirky and satirical self-portraits, and masks, and this is what I admire about his work. The exhibit was segmented into four categories that were meant to reflect the progression of his art. The first category, A Kind of Modernity, included work from early on in his career, just after 1880. After studying at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Brussels, Ensor returned to his hometown of Ostend with the intention of revolutionizing painting, though he’d later establish himself in Brussels. Ensor was confident in his originality and strength in his experimental work, which was largely based on the study of light, and this intrigue with light sustained him for most of his career. Although he was often categorized with Impressionists, he eschewed this classification.

The second part of the exhibit, “Light has ennobled me”, refers to Ensor’s observations that light is the opposite of line, which is in itself, “the enemy of genius; it cannot express passion, anxiety struggle, pain, enthusiasm or poetry, such beautiful and great feelings[...]“. Ensor was convinced that he was the first painter to express the reality of light. Driven by his convictions, his work during this “period” shows a mystical aspect replaced the more modern inspirations of his earlier work. The result was landscapes that became more distant from reality, representing something more akin to images of a primitive chaos dominated by a spiritual power.

The third part of the exhibit, “Strangeness reigns everywhere”, moved me greatly because it represented a turning point in Ensor’s career, triggered by the death of his father and grandmother in 1887. He began a series of drawings called “Visions”, which were badly received, and the criticism affected Ensor greatly. I thought these were quite beautiful and moving, albeit a little scary; his grief apparent in them. His approach soon changed, though: he began painting scenes where masks concealed people and heightened a reality that Ensor found too ugly and cruel, while skeletons pointed to the vanity and absurdity of the world. He produced several panels, engravings and drawings denouncing the injustices of his time while also expressing some of his own more personal concerns.

The last room in the exhibit featured 112 self-portraits, which were both mesmerizing and frightening. Émile Verhaeren once wrote, “It would be surprising if Ensor, who loved his art above all else, and consequently loved the person who created it, that is, himself, had not reproduced his own image ad infinitum.” Ensor seemingly did love his art, and by extension, himself, but for someone who also could not tolerate criticism or a lack of understanding, who was both anxious and extremely sensitive, yet who also believed he was the most excoriated artist of his time, the exercise was not simply one of self-reverence. From these portraits — which vary from large to very small, with various mediums and different styles: realist, sardonic, caricatural, macabre — I got the sense that they express his changing moods and individual growth and struggles, particularly as they span a long period of time. They also somehow unify his work, as they follow along with the style of his paintings, portraying himself in his studio, surrounded by his masks, ghosts and paintings. They demonstrate how abundant and brilliant his work was, and also how disparate. My favorite is his portrait of his head on a platter.