In 1987, amidst protests in Belgium against the sale, the Getty Museum bought James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels 1889 for US$9 million. The equivuílent today is well over US$24 million, and the sale confirmed Ensor’s place in the pantheon of great 19th century artists. A native of Ostend, the city is hosting a year-long festival to celebrate the life and times of its most famous son to commemorate his death in 1949 – there’s even a straw Ensor at the train station.
Ensor is best known for his fantastical, often grotesque imagery – particularly of masks that bring to mind masks that grace Belgium’s raucous carnival festivities. It would be easy to think of these works simply as bizarre, but his innovative blend of symbolism and expressionism was also a scathing political and social commentary, mocking the rich and powerful, the bourgeoisie. Unsurprisingly, he was a contemporary of Félicien Rops.
Even when painting still lifes, Ensor can conjure up a nightmarish, troubling scene. His painting called The Skate is just one example, and it leaps out amongst the special exhibition called Rose, Rose, Rose à mes yeux being held at Mu.ZEE as part of the celebrations. Around a third of Ensor’s work were still lifes, and the exhibition features fifty of them alongside those of other Belgium artists.
The son of a Belgian mother and an English father, he was born and lived most of his life in Ostend, at the time one of the most fashionable seaside resorts in northern Europe. Here his parents ran a souvenir shop filled with all kinds of strange and wonderful items, including items from China and Japan that clearly had an influence on his artistic career. Their house was above the shop one street back from Ostend’s beach.
It was here in the attic that he had his most productive period of creativity in the 1880s and 1890s. Christ’s Entry into Brussels 1889, painted in 1888, is perhaps the crowning glory. Sadly, the attic of the house is not open to the public today, but two other floors are, including the souvenir shop his parents ran, and which he left untouched after their deaths. The upstairs living rooms feature his original furniture and copies of his works.
Coupled with the exhibition at Mu.ZEE, the Ensor House offers a deep dive into the man, the society and the city in which he lived. There is even a great piece of video footage of him in 1947 on Ostend’s seafront with the damage of the Second World War still evident. Concrete bunkers the German’s built as part of the Atlantic Wall sit amongst still standing 19th century villas.
In this period Ostend became known as “the queen of the Belgian seaside resorts”, attracting well-heeled visitors from across Europe, including the Belgian King, Leopold II. The presence of the ‘Butcher of Congo’, spurred the development of grand buildings, most sadly lost to rampant and unsympathetic development. Yet here and there you still get glimpses of the former glamour that Ensor would have known.
We strolled around the town, taking in the small squares, parks, marina and harbour and visiting the elaborate Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Ostend is a lively place, and people are friendly here. A fun evening was had in Café Botteltje, a traditional ‘brown’ cafe with a beer menu to make the mind boggle. A little fuzzy the next day, we set off into a brisk wind and strolled along the beach to the small town of Middelkerke.
On the route we passed the faded glamour that are the Royal Galleries of Ostend. Built between 1902-04 on the orders of Leopold II (there’s a statue of him on a horse with all the people of Belgium and the colonies at his feet), although it is listed as a protected monument, it is suffering from a monumental failure to protect it. Dilapidated barely begins to describe the once grand building.
The fate of the Royal Galleries is mirrored in the fate of other historic buildings that have been replaced with truly horrific 1970s-style apartment blocks. The ’70s were’t a vintage decade for architecture. Examples of this fact were displayed all along the coast until we finally arrived in Middelkerke (where they are building an ugly casino right on the beach), from where we caught the coast tram back to Ostend.
