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9/4/2008

Doctrinal Nourishment

Los Angeles County Museum of Art - LACMA, Los Angeles

Curated by Theresa Papanikolas

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents a special exhibition featuring approximately fifty works on paper by the Belgian artist James Ensor and nineteen of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, on view from April 10 to July 6, 2008. At the center of the exhibition is Ensor’s etching, and LACMA’s recent acquisition, Doctrinal Nourishment [Alimentation Doctrinaire] (1889/95), a provocative send-up of authoritarian hubris that lampoons the Belgian ruling classes as bloated, self-satisfied tyrants, sitting, bare-bottomed, on a high wall and emptying their bowels into the awaiting mouths of a ravenous crowd. Created in 1889, this print critiqued the unstable socio-political climate aggravated and perpetuated by the oppressive policies of King Leopold II (1865–1909). By dismissing autocratic rule as a foul diet to be swallowed obediently by the masses, Ensor laid bare not only the brutality of Leopold’s regime, but also the people’s unquestioning willingness to accept it. “Doctrinal Nourishment”: Art and Anarchism in the Time of James Ensor is the first exhibition to examine his rare etching—one of only three hand-colored impressions in existence—in light of Ensor’s own political radicalism as well as that of artists who shared his subversive spirit.

Ensor was a painter, draftsman, and printmaker who was educated in the realist and impressionist traditions of the mid-nineteenth century, but who went on to marshal the bizarre, the macabre, the perverse, and the subversive into a scathing commentary on contemporary society. He was inspired by artists who inverted dominant discourses by pushing the boundaries of visual decorum, and he drew impetus, for example, from British and French political satire, particularly that of Charles Pilipon and Honoré Daumier (In Gargantua [1831], Daumier anticipates Ensor in lampooning the monarchy—in this case that of French King Louis-Philippe—in a particularly vulgar way). Ensor was also an enthusiastic admirer of Francisco de Goya, who was notorious for exploiting the grotesque to expose humanity’s irrational side, as in one of his most recognizable works, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799).

The exhibition brings together a variety of works by Ensor to add focus to the outrageous acerbity of Doctrinal Nourishment. A number of them, such as The Gendarmes (1888), Belgium in the XIXth Century (1889), and The Good Judges (1894), similarly make blatant reference to imbalances of power. Other works like The Cathedral (1886), The Entry of Christ into Brussels (1898), and The Baths at Ostend (1899), offer more subtle socio-political critiques.

A substantial portion of the exhibition is devoted to the dynamic exchange that Ensor shared with artistic contemporaries such as Odilon Redon and Félicien Rops, as well as with a younger generation of artists: including the German expressionists Otto Dix, Erich Heckel, Käthe Kollwitz, and Emil Nolde; and the dadaist George Grosz—all of whom, like Ensor, developed deliberately coarse styles and made liberal use of satire and caricatural line to speak to broad social inequities and expose more specifically the ineptness of those in power. Indeed, in fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century avantgarde circles, the subversion of the authority of artistic tradition through the cultivation of one’s individual style was understood as a powerful weapon for social change.

In lampooning the ruling classes—the bishop and nun of the Catholic Party, the Liberal Party’s coat-tailed bureaucrat, the military officer, and King Leopold II—Doctrinal Nourishment operates firmly within this aesthetic. While expertly crafted, it is also deliberately and uniquely unconventional—its form is exaggerated; its space cramped; its surface muddied; and its subject, in the true spirit of black humor, is as grim as it is hilarious. In examining Doctrinal Nourishment both in light of Ensor’s career and of the tumultuous times in which it unfolded, “Doctrinal Nourishment”: Art and Anarchism in the Time of James Ensor not only celebrates the acquisition of a rare example of this remarkable artist’s work, but it also adds texture to our understanding of his pivotal position in the history of modern art.

Curated by Theresa Papanikolas, Wallis Annenberg Curatorial Fellow in the department of Prints and Drawings at LACMA, the exhibition brings Doctrinal Nourishment together with works selected primarily from LACMA’s significant holdings in Ensor and German expressionist prints, enhanced by key works from local institutions and private collections.

Publication
The exhibition will be followed by a book-length study of Doctrinal Nourishment, with an essay by Theresa Papanikolas and illustrations of exhibited and supporting work, forthcoming from LACMA in 2009.

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

About LACMA LACMA, the largest art museum in the Western United States, leads the field in devoting a greater share of its space and programming to contemporary art than any other encyclopedic museum. With a recently expanded modern collection and a new contemporary art museum, BCAM, on its campus, LACMA offers visitors a unique lens through which to view its renowned and established collections, including particular strengths in Asian, Latin American, European, and American art.

Image: James Ensor (1860–1949), Doctrinal Nourishment (Alimentation Doctrinaire), 1889/95, etching printed with tone and hand-colored with white gouache and with red, yellow, and blue chalk and watercolor, image: 9 3/8 x 7 1/16 in., sheet: 9 1/4 x 11 5/8 in., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds generously provided by the Joan Palevsky Bequest, photo © 2008 Museum Associates/LACMA

Press Contact: Christine Choi, cchoi@lacma.org, 323 932-5883

Los Angeles County Museum of Art LACMA is located at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036.
Museum Hours and Admission: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, noon–8 pm; Friday, noon–9 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 11 am–8 pm; closed Wednesday.
Adults $12; students 18+ with ID and senior citizens 62+ $8; children 17 and under are admitted free. Admission (except to specially ticketed exhibitions) is free the second Tuesday of every month, every evening after 5 pm, and on Target Free Holiday Mondays.

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