goya, redon, ensor

GOYA, REDON, ENSOR
GROTESQUE PAINTINGS
AND DRAWINGS
KONINKLIJK MUSEUM
VOOR SCHONE KUNSTEN ANTWERPEN
14 MARCH - 14 JUNE 2009
THIS EXHIBITION INCLUDES EXCEPTIONAL LOANS
FROM MUSÉE D’ORSAY
INTRO
This exhibition features paintings, drawings and prints by three
great masters: Francisco Goya, Odilon Redon and James Ensor.
All three are regarded as highly original and groundbreaking artists.
They are commonly referred to in the arts literature as precursors of
modern art.
The exhibition focuses on their grotesque work, for it is in these
strange, capricious, fantastic and hilarious scenes that they are at their
magnificent best. Besides working as a court painter to the Spanish
crown, Francisco Goya (1746-1828) produced series of paintings and
prints that are very personal representations of the superstition, the
corruption and the horrors of his era. Demons, witches and fools play
a tragicomic role in this work. The bizarre and melancholic oeuvre
of Odilon Redon (1840-1916), on the other hand, occupies an exceptional position in Symbolist art. Redon is the creator of a dream world
inhabited by monsters, ghosts and other fantastic creatures.
James Ensor (1860-1949) similarly portrayed masks, skeletons and
fiendish creatures and painted caricatural and grotesque human
forms that lead an absurd existence.
On the face of it, the three artists have little in common, but if we
study their work more closely the similarities become increasingly
apparent.
1. THE REDISCOVERY
OF GOYA
In the course of the 19th century, Goya acquired international reognition, first in France and subsequently in Belgium. Authors such
as Victor Hugo, George Sand and Charles Baudelaire and visual artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Edouard Manet and Odilon Redon
admired the Spaniard’s work. His prints, which offer glimpses of
strange and irrational worlds, were particularly popular.
James Ensor, too, was an admirer of Goya’s art. During a visit in
1884 to the Museum of Fine Arts in Lille (France), Ensor was dazzled
by his Time of the Old Women, a painting featuring two hideous old
ladies.
In 1885, Odilon Redon published a portfolio of prints as a tribute
to Goya. It consists of six pitch-black lithographs that are reminiscent
of the Spaniard’s mysterious and dark series of prints, Los Disparates.
It was this Homage to Goya, which was exhibited at the 1886 Salon of
the Brussels group Les XX, that established Redon’s name in Belgian
artistic circles.
In his novel A rebours (Against the Grain, 1884), Joris-Karl
Huysmans writes the following on the subject of Goya-mania:
‘The savage vigour, the uncompromising, reckless talent of this
artist captivated him [=Des Esseintes, the novel’s single protagonist]. Yet, at the same time, the universal admiration his works had
won put him off somewhat, and for years he had always refused to
frame them, fearing […] that the first noodle who might happen
to see them would feel himself bound to talk inanities and fall into
an ecstasy in stereotyped phrases as he stood in front of them’
FRANCISCO GOYA, Los Caprichos, Self-Portrait , 1799,
etching, aquatint, drypoint and burin, Ceuleers-Van de Velde, Antwerp
2. GOYA
AND ‘LOS DISPARATES’
Goya, a talented draughtsman, opted in his graphic work for the
technique of etching, which approximates most closely to painting.
It is a medium that offers scope for expression and the suggestion of
tonality. Three series of etchings were published during his lifetime:
a series of copies after Velázquez, Los Caprichos (Caprices) and La
Tauromaquia (The Art of Bullfighting). Two further series, Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War) and Los Disparates (Follies),
appeared posthumously.
The twenty-two prints in the Disparates series date from the end
of Goya’s long artistic career. They are a wonderful illustration of his
rich imagination. Goya succeeds like no other artist in elevating
amusing and pathetic scenes to images of a sinister and fascinating
beauty.
The prints consist in dark, gripping scenes seeming with menace
and folly. Some of the images contain references to carnival, while
others may be interpreted as metaphors. Occasionally, the meaning
is entirely illusive.
FRANCISCO GOYA, Modo de volar, A Way of Flying , 1815-24,
etching, aquatint and drypoint (?), Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen
3. ODILON REDON,
AN ARCH SYMBOLIST
As a young artist, Odilon Redon was already opposed to art
that merely strove to be true to nature. Under the influence of engraver Rodolphe Bresdin, he developed a very personal iconography,
characterised by a daring and mystical imagination. He borrowed
characters from the Bible and from classical mythology and combined them with shapes, colours and textures from the fascinating
world of nature. His bizarre creations evoked feelings of anxiety and
alienation in a manner that heralded the subjective visual imagery of
Symbolism. Redon was also an avid reader. His series of prints devoted to Poe, Goethe, Flaubert and Baudelaire are dreamlike evocations of their texts.
Redon’s lithographs
More so than any other artist, Redon explored the expressive
qualities of black. Up until 1890, he worked almost exclusively in black
and white. These noirs, as he liked to call them, are charcoal drawings
and lithographs. He was introduced to the technique of lithography
by Henri Fantin-Latour around 1877. Using semi-transparent transfer
paper, Redon produced copies of existing drawings. Subsequently, a
lithographer would transfer them largely mechanically and mirrorwise onto a lithographic stone. His first album of lithographs, entitled
Dans le rêve (In the Dream), appeared in 1879.
ODILON REDON, Self-Portrait , 1888,
charcoal and black chalk on paper, Collection Gemeentemuseum The Hague
4. AN INVASION
OF DEMONS
Joris-Karl Huysmans describes
some of Redon’s noirs in his novel
A rebours (Against the Grain, 1884) .
‘In their light frames of unpainted
pear-wood, with a gold beading,
they contained productions of an
inconceivable eccentricity, – a head
in a Merovingian style, placed
upon a cup; a bearded man, having
something about him recalling at one
and the same time a Buddhist priest
and an orator at a public meeting,
touching with the tip of his finger a
colossal cannonball; a horrible spider,
with a human face lodged in the
middle of its body. Then there were
crayons that went further yet in the
horrors of a nightmare dream.’
Goya’s demons, witches and other light-shy creatures have been
haunting the minds of fellow artists and the public for more than two
centuries. They tie in with an age-old tradition of fantastic art. Evil
spirits in grotesque guises can, for example, also be seen taunting and
tormenting their human victims in mediaeval manuscript illuminations and in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel.
Goya’s first major series of prints, Los Caprichos, consists of mysterious representations of witches, monsters, dwarfs and demons. In
a sales advertisement for the Caprichos, Goya explains that the series
was inspired by the incongruencies of human folly. During the drawing process, he liked to give free rein to his imagination, resulting in
representations of a personal pandemonium.
The work of Ensor is similarly inhabited by fantastic beings.
Around 1886, Ensor began to alter his early, more realistic studies of
objects and interiors of the parental home, adding all kinds of comical and demonic creatures. Through these interventions, innocent
compositions were transformed into grotesque masquerades. Ensor’s
taste for the bizarre also drew him to the demonic motifs in Japanese
print and mask-making, as well as to the grotesque art of such old
masters as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel.
5. AFTER
EDGAR ALLAN POE
The bizarre and macabre stories and poems of the American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) soon took Europe by storm. The
excellent translations by Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé
contributed considerably to the dissemination of Poe’s oeuvre in
France and Belgium. Poe inspired not only writers and poets, but also
musicians and visual artists.
In 1882, Redon published a series of lithographs dedicated to E.A.
Poe, a move that was most likely prompted by the author’s popularity.
In 1886, at the third Salon of Les XX in Brussels, he displayed a charcoal drawing based on the story The Mask of the Red Death. The piece
was purchased by Edmond Picard, one of the co-founders of Les XX
and a great admirer of Redon’s work.
Ensor shared Redon’s fascination with Poe. Many of his drawings,
prints and paintings are illustrations of Poe’s stories and are named
after them: King Pest, Hop-Frog, The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart.
The skeleton, as the ultimate personification of death, also plays
its morbid role in the visual vocabulary of the grotesque. Skeletons
appear in some of the work of Redon and Ensor, as disrupters of intimate scenes and inducing a sense of disquiet in the viewer.
JAMES ENSOR, Skeletons Making Music , 1888, pencil and brown chalk on paper, Private Collection
6. MASQUERADE
AND EXPOSURE
Masks are universal props in religious and profane rituals. In the
work of James Ensor, they began to feature prominently from around
1888 and soon became his trademark. This grotesque and carnivalesque iconography is generally regarded as Ensor’s most striking contribution to the rise of modern art. Ensor liked masks for their bright
colours and because they irritated the public that had received his
work so negatively.
In Western art, masks had appeared as theatrical attributes or as
symbols of hypocrisy long before Ensor incorporated them into his
art. Masks allow individuals to hide their true identity and personality. Francisco Goya was arguably the first artist to represent evillooking masks not as a manner of disguise, but for their expressive
qualities as such. Ensor, too, relies on masks as a means of exposure:
the ludicrous, evil, ugly or foolish expression of his fantastic masked
beings actually reveals their true nature.
JAMES ENSOR, Self-Portrait , c. 1890,
black chalk on panel, Gallery Ronny Van de Velde, Antwerp
7. BRAWLS
AND BATTLES
Goya’s series of etchings Los Desastres de la Guerra, which he created between 1810 and 1820, consists of 83 plates. They represent the
horrors that occurred during the Spanish uprising against Napoleon’s
occupying forces in 1808. The first 47 etchings are disturbing snapshots of the civil war: scenes of torture, rape, fighting and executions;
in sum, the uncensored brutality of war, stripped of any notion of heroism. A smaller part of the series is devoted to the famine that held
Madrid in its grip in 1811-1812 and claimed the lives of over 20,000
people. The final etchings, in which Goya primarily ridicules the clergy, deal with abuses in Spain after the departure of the French. It was
not until 1863, more than thirty years after the death of the artist, that
Desastres de la Guerra appeared on the market.
Ensor, too, represented topical social issues, such as the clashes
in 1887 between the fishermen of Ostend and their English rivals, and
the violent intervention by security forces that ensued. The uncouth
and fiendish figures that appear in such drawings and etchings transform the social conflict into a grotesque spectacle.
8. MYSTIFICATION
OF THE RELIGIOUS
In the nineteenth century, a trend developed alongside conventional religious art that saw artists borrow biblical themes, but without religious intentions. The biblical stories and hagiographies about
good and evil, sin and temptation, offered writers and visual artists a
window onto the darker side of the human psyche. The inspiration
drawn from these texts sometimes resulted in scenes of great introspection and strong mysticism, as in Redon’s portfolio The Apocalypse
of Saint John, or it could lead to formal experiments, as in Ensor’s
series of drawings entitled The Haloes of Christ or the Sensitivities of
Light.
Redon’s fascination with the figure of Christ persisted throughout his artistic career. He represented the son of God as a tormented
soul and in a highly expressive style. The figure of Christ also appears
frequently in the work of Ensor. In fact, in his perceived rejection by
the public and critics, Ensor sometimes identified with Christ.
Practical information
Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen
Leopold De Waelplaats, 2000 Antwerpen
From March 14 to June 14 2009
From Tuesday to Saturday: 10am - 5pm
Sunday: 10am – 6pm
Closed: Monday, and on May 1st (May Day) and May 21
2009 (Ascension Day)
The museum is accessible to disabled visitors via a separate entrance
to the right of the steps leading to the main entrance.
Admission
€8
€ 6 discounts: age over 60, students, groups (15 or more)
€ 1 19 to 25 years
€ 0 under 18, Friends of the Royal Museum
Admission includes access to the permanent collection.
The Belgian national railway company NMBS offers combined tickets
for travel and admission to the exhibition. For further information on
rates and conditions, visit www.b-rail.be.
Audioguide € 2
Nocturnes: 6 pm – 10 pm
Wednesday March 25
Wednesday April 29
Wednesday May 27
Admission: € 4 | € 1 | € 0 (exhibition only)
Guided tours for Groups (up to 20)
Guided tours take approx. 90 minutes and cost € 70 (€ 50 for school
groups). For reservations, call +32 (0)3 242 04 16 or visit
publiekswerking@kmka.be
ODILON REDON, Homage to Goya II: The Marsh Flower, a Sad Human Head , 1885,
lithograph, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Publication
Goya, Redon, Ensor. Grotesque Paintings and Drawings,
with contributions by Herwig Todts, Xavier Tricot
and Isabelle van den Broecke, published by Lannoo
(240 p., € 29,95, ISBN 978 90 209 8342 5).
For sale at the museum shop or via bookshop@kmska.be.
Colophon
This visitors guide is based on the exhibition catalogue
Goya, Redon, Ensor. Grotesque Paintings and Drawings,
published by Lannoo, 2009.
Text: Siska Beele, with thanks to Herwig Todts and Greta Toté
Translation: Stephen Windross
Design: Herman Houbrechts and Tom Hautekiet
Printed: Drukkerij Godefroit
February 2009
Executive Editor: Dr. Paul Huvenne,
Plaatsnijdersstraat 2, B-2000 Antwerpen
El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.
Francisco Goya, Capricho nr. 43
… le Prince des mystérieux rêves, le Paysagiste
des eaux souterraines et des déserts bouleversés
de lave; …, le subtil Lithographe de la Douleur, …
… the Prince of mysterious dreams,
the Landscaper of underground streams
and deserts tossed upside down by flows of lava;…,
the subtle Lithographer of Pain, …
Joris-Karl Huysmans
on Odilon Redon in Revue indépendante, 1885
Je crois être un peintre d’exception.
I daresay I am an exceptional artist.
James Ensor