An unexpected object sits in the first room of the exhibition Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans, opening at London’s Royal Academy of Arts on 29 October (until 29 January 2017). The Belgian painter Tuymans, who organised the show, has placed a hat featuring a mushroom-cloud of ostrich plumes on a low plinth. This extravagant headdress is of the sort worn by Gilles, the clown-like figures who also don masks and throw oranges at the annual carnival in the Belgian town of Binche. Elsewhere in the show is one of Tuymans’s own paintings: a ghostly image of one of the Gilles wearing the hat. Intriguing, indeed; but what does this have to do with Ensor, the great Belgian proto-Expressionist? Tuymans sees the references to Gilles de Binche as a way of connecting Ensor (1860-1949) to our own era. “What I did with the series of the Binches, Ensor did too,” Tuymans says, “he was asking what would happen if you were to reenact the folkloric, and all the disturbances that come with it. We’re living in times when populism is [on the rise], not to say inevitable—think of Brexit, think of what happened in the entirety of Europe, of Trump and Clinton. Not unlike us, Ensor also lived in turbulent times: the socialist party came up, there were popular movements.”
Ensor’s response to these movements can be found in the titular painting The Intrigue (1890), a tableau of figures in grotesque carnivalesque masks. “The masks are a vehicle by which he translates a very specific element of anger, and angst,” Tuymans says, “and that particular fear was a fear against the masses, it is the fear of the bourgeois.”
Tuymans credits Ensor as an influence on the development of his own art. When he was 18, Tuymans won an award for a self-portrait, and as well as prize money was given a book of Ensor’s work. “It just fell open on the self-portrait at the easel from when he was 18 years old, which is here [at the Royal Academy]. And although mine was formally different, what came out of that portrait was exactly the same. So it was fucked up, because I thought I had made something authentic and it wasn’t. But then I came up with this rather regressive stance on it which would be the ‘authentic forgery’, so one of my first conceptual ideas is in that sense linked to Ensor, in a weird way.”
Although Ensor “was very liberal and he was a rebel”, Tuymans says, he was also “a grand artist, he was a trained artist, and that’s why I also included all these drawings and etchings—he was such an exquisite draughtsman”. He sees one particular drawing, another self-portrait made when Ensor was 18, as particularly spectacular. “Picasso, actually, can go home, despite being a wonder child,” Tuymans laughs. “This drawing comes close to the exquisite drawings of Holbein.”