Wonderfully mad

Everyone knows about the magnetism of Paris and New York in the annals of modern art, but Belgian painters such as Van de Velde, Toorop, Van Rysselberghe, Evenepoel, Khnopff, Rops, Magritte, Delvaux and Permeke are remarkably significant. The galleries of satellite cities such as Brussels (now only two and a quarter hours away from London by Eurostar) always repay study. On the other hand, actual works of groundbreaking art were often executed far away from large urban centres. They were produced in sleepier and more outlandish locations. Aix-en-Provence, Arles and Tahiti will conjure up the names of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin.

The Belgian port of Ostend is currently conjuring up the unique and outstanding figure of James Ensor (1860–1949). His father was a cultured, multilingual Englishman who failed in business, married beneath himself and took to the bottle — but at least he appreciated his son’s art, unlike other members of the Ensor family, apparently.

Ensor first excelled as an innovative Realist — an early work brilliantly portrays his sister tucking into a plate of oysters — but he paved the way for Expressionism, Surrealism and much else. Influenced by Turner, he manipulated paint with great freedom as he responded with ultra-sensitivity to local effects of light. He also had the graphic talent of a satirical cartoonist or caricaturist. Hogarth, Gillray and Daumier were mentors. By the late 1880s Ensor was one of the most daring painters of his day. ‘His brush rushes across the canvas and whirls with an insouciance equalled only by the audacity of his imagination.’ These are the words of Alfred Barr, first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ensor’s enormous, rebellious masterpiece ‘Christ Entering Brussels in 1889’, never exhibited in public until 1929, is now in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles.