GOYA, REDON, ENSORGROTESQUE PAINTINGSAND DRAWINGS

KONINKLIJK MUSEUMVOOR SCHONE KUNSTEN ANTWERPEN14 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 excep-tional 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 re- ognition, first in France and subsequently in Belgium. Authors such as Victor Hugo, George Sand and Charles Baudelaire and visual art-ists 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 protago-nist]. 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 Desas-tres 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 en-graver 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 com-bined 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 de-voted to Poe, Goethe, Flaubert and Baudelaire are dreamlike evoca-tions of their texts.

Redon’s lithographsMore 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 mirror-wise 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

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.’

4. AN INVASIONOF DEMONS

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 illumina-tions and in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel.

Goya’s first major series of prints, Los Caprichos, consists of mys-terious 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 draw-ing 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 comi-cal 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 au-thor 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 char-coal 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 inti-mate 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. MASQUERADEAND 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 carnivales-que iconography is generally regarded as Ensor’s most striking con-tribution 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 perso-nality. Francisco Goya was arguably the first artist to represent evil-looking 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. BRAWLSAND BATTLES

Goya’s series of etchings Los Desastres de la Guerra, which he cre-ated 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 snap-shots of the civil war: scenes of torture, rape, fighting and executions; in sum, the uncensored brutality of war, stripped of any notion of her-oism. 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 cler-gy, 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 trans-form the social conflict into a grotesque spectacle.

8. MYSTIFICATIONOF THE RELIGIOUS

In the nineteenth century, a trend developed alongside conven-tional religious art that saw artists borrow biblical themes, but with-out 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 intro-spection 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 through-out 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 informationKoninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten AntwerpenLeopold De Waelplaats, 2000 AntwerpenFrom March 14 to June 14 2009From Tuesday to Saturday: 10am - 5pmSunday: 10am – 6pmClosed: 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 MuseumAdmission 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 pmWednesday March 25Wednesday April 29Wednesday May 27Admission: € 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 visitpubliekswerking@kmka.be

ODILON REDON, Homage to Goya II: The Marsh Flower, a Sad Human Head, 1885,

lithograph, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

PublicationGoya, 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.

ColophonThis 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 TotéTranslation: Stephen WindrossDesign: Herman Houbrechts and Tom HautekietPrinted: Drukkerij GodefroitFebruary 2009Executive 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