JAMES ENSOR'S 'THE ENTRY OF CHRIST INTO BRUSSELS IN 1889'

Among the landmarks of modern European painting an occasional work so challenges its public, so overwhelms the critics, that even repeated exposure to it through exhibitions and numerous publications yields very little interpretation. Such a fate has greeted the Belgian painter James Ensor's (1860-1949) monumental painting, The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889, 1888, since it was first shown publicly in 1929 in Brussels and Paris in a large retrospective of Ensor's work. From that time the painting--Ensor's undisputed masterpiece--has always had admirers, but none has ventured deeply into its sources and its meaning.;It is clear that the painting was, at least in part, intended to be an indictment of Ensor's society. In it Ensor makes reference to the turbulent social and political situation in Belgium in the 1880s: the rising socialist movement, the challenges to orthodox economic Liberalism, the struggles between Church and State, and the linguistic conflict between the Flemings and the Walloons.;The Entry is also a major example of Ensor's turn of interest in 1888 to imagery of masks, skeletons, and the macabre, and it indicates his awareness of both popular and avant-garde literature in Belgium and France in the 1880s which dealt with just those subjects. It marks his considered decision to incorporate them into his art as a means to more freely explore his interest in light and color, and to avail himself of these expressive subjects through which he could caricature certain elements of his society.;At a time of crisis in his artistic career the Entry comes as an artistic response to a tendency which Ensor saw in his society to adhere blindly to partisan allegiances--to follow mindlessly the brass band, wherever it might lead and for whatever purpose--a tendency which Ensor perceived as threatening his society and by extension his art and himself.;To work towards an understanding of the content and meaning of the Entry, this dissertation examines the social, political, and artistic milieu in which Ensor painted it, Ensor's biography, the development of his art before the Entry, and the form of the painting itself.;Finally, for Ensor the Entry was an allegory of his career as an artist in provincial Ostend attempting to gain acceptance in the capital city. By 1888 he was developing a heightened identification with Christ, and the mocking gestures and buffoonery which greet Christ as he comes into Brussels are the equivalent of the incomprehension and derision which Ensor saw himself face each year when he exhibited his work in Brussels.