Masks Mocking Death, 1888
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And what would that kind of art look like? In that same year, he provided one answer in Tribulations of Saint Anthony, a pandemonium crammed with the kind of scribble-scrawl images the world would not see again until Cy Twombly came along more than six decades later. Around this time, Ensor also started bringing his masks and skeletons out to play on a regular basis. From then on, personal and social relations in his work would be a dark comedy, performed in disguise and in party colors, with the Grim Reaper making regular entrances to rattle his bones in your face. It's a spook show too tawdry to be frightening, one that takes place in threadbare rooms and in rag-barrel costumes, but that's the point. In Ensor the dramas of existence are mostly shabby ones. In Masks Mocking Death, even death is just another lowlife, a target of scorn — though he looks as if he knows he's going to get the last laugh.
Ensor drew lessons in form and color from Turner, Courbet and Manet, but the spirit of his work, the mad afflatus of his gift, owes more to the Germans. His devils are inherited from Bosch and Brueghel. His taste for the grotesque traces back to Grünewald. He, in turn, would hand on his caustic vision of humanity to the German Expressionists, younger artists like Emil Nolde and Ernst Kirchner who saw the possibilities in his combination of sour disposition and strident palette.
Chronically aggrieved, Ensor was the sort of man who didn't hesitate to draw himself as Christ crucified or, better, as a pickled herring being pulled apart by two art critics represented as skulls. Perhaps because he never expected his work to be accepted, he could pursue it to its furthest conclusions. But then — surprise — the honors started coming his way anyway. Museums began acquiring his art and offering him big shows. In 1929, Belgium's King Albert I even named him a baron, which makes you wonder if Albert had ever seen Ensor's etching of a king defecating on the heads of the people. By the time Ensor died, in 1949, he was a national treasure — which can only mean the Belgians must be awfully good sports. And that they knew an odd genius when they saw one. Even if it's true that after 1900 he was increasingly a spent force, for two feverish decades, Ensor was a force to be reckoned with.