Enigma variations | 3 November 2016

On 2 August 1933 one of the more improbable meetings of the 20th century took place when Albert Einstein had lunch with James Ensor. Apparently, Einstein attempted to explain his theory of relativity to Ensor, who doesn’t seem to have understood it. That evening the painter gave a speech, entitled ‘Ensor to Einstein’, ending with a sort of apology. Painters, he exclaimed — ‘alas and alack!’ — were slaves to vision and resistant to ‘positive reason, to calculations, to probabilities’.

However, Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans at the Royal Academy is an exhibition that is subject to the principle of relativity. This is not simply a display of work by Ensor, but Ensor as seen from the perspective of Tuymans, the most celebrated of living Belgian painters. The result is curious, not always easy to follow, but distinctly, well, intriguing.

Ensor (1860–1949) was an enigmatic oddball, both as a painter and as a man. His father was an expatriate English alcoholic and his mother came from the Flemish seaside town of Ostend where the family ran a souvenir and curiosity shop. According to Tuymans, Ensor was badly offended when a fellow artist named Léon Spilliaert announced to him that Ostend was not the whole world.

As far as Ensor was concerned, the resort was his entire world. Or at least he spent his life living and working there and the gamey atmosphere of the place — roughly speaking, a blend of Antwerp and Clacton — permeates his work. As a painter, he began as a talented exponent of the gloomy northern European realism of the day.

Early pictures such as ‘The Bourgeois Salon’ (1880) and ‘Afternoon in Ostend’ (1881) depict dark interiors, with heavy impasto and a subdued, stuffy mood.