James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, by far the largest and surely the strangest painting in the Getty Museum’s collection, visualizes the double-edged nature of crowds.
A bizarre parade spills through the city streets: soldiers, musicians, politicians, and revelers, all surrounding a minuscule figure of Jesus astride a donkey. Ensor rendered the scene, at once celebratory and nightmarish, in lurid colors and with crude brushstrokes. The roiling spectacle has always struck me as both exhilarating and unnerving.
Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, 1888, James Ensor. Oil on canvas, 99 ½ x 169 ½ in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 87.PA.96. Digital image courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program
Ensor intended his monumental painting as a barbed commentary on politics, religion, and society in fin-de-siècle Belgium, his native country. But what does the scene actually represent? A political demonstration? A religious celebration? A Mardi Gras festival? For one acclaimed early 20th-century American writer, the painting’s imagery appears to have called to mind the spellbinding effects of popular Hollywood cinema and the fluid line between mass entertainment and urban chaos.
When the Getty acquired the painting in 1987, writers in the press noted its peculiar connection to Los Angeles: Ensor’s wide-screen composition was long said to have inspired Nathanael West’s brilliant 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, a sharply satirical evisceration of Hollywood as a “dream factory.”
1939 The Day of the Locust book cover © Random House
West, who moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1935 to work as a screenwriter, based his novel on personal experience. The protagonist, a set painter named Tod Hackett, interacts with an array of movie-industry castoffs—washed up vaudevillians, dime-store cowboys, and would-be starlets, as well as a depressed hotel clerk from the Midwest named Homer Simpson—people who, in Tod’s view, “have come to California to die.”
Evocations of Ensor’s painting pervade the novel. Several of the characters seem to have stepped from the canvas: one of them, we read, “had very little back or top to his head. It was almost all face, like a mask.” Another, a child actor dressed as a soldier and sporting plucked eyebrows, “rolled his eyes back in his head so that only the whites showed and twisted his lips in a snarl.”
Detail from Ensor’s Christ Entering Brussels
Visiting the studio backlot, Tod observes a cast of hundreds gathering to film the Battle of Waterloo. “An army of cavalry and foot was passing. It moved like a mob; its lines broken, as though fleeing some terrible defeat. The dolmans of the hussars, the heavy shakos of the guards, Hanoverian light horse, with their fat leather caps and flowing red plumes, were all jumbled together in bobbing disorder.”
Detail from Ensor’s Christ Entering Brussels
Frustrated by his hack work for movies, Tod plans his artistic revenge: an enormous painting entitled “The Burning of Los Angeles,” a vast scene of urban turmoil as engrossing as any silver screen epic: “[Tod] wanted the city to have quite a gala air as it burned, to appear almost gay. And the people who set it on fire would be a holiday crowd.”
Tod finds examples of Tinseltown hypocrisy in counterfeit religiosity. He visits revival halls to study the zealots shouting from the pews: “He would paint their fury with respect, appreciating its awful, anarchic power and aware that they had it in them to destroy civilization.” These passages surely recalled for readers the ostentatious sermons delivered at Angelus Temple in Echo Park by the media-obsessed evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. With their brass bands, tiered choirs, and massed congregants whipped into a messianic frenzy, Sister Aimee’s elaborate spectacles could verge on Ensor-like pandemonium.
Sister Aimee preaching at Angelus Temple, c. 1929–30; vintage postcard
A current of anxiety, even danger, courses through any large gathering of people, whatever brings them together—political protest, religious celebration, or popular entertainment. The Day of the Locust ends with a throng assembling for a movie premiere outside “Kahn’s Persian Palace” (a stand-in for Grauman’s Chinese Theater). The celebrity-crazed fans grow increasingly agitated, incited by brutal cops and egged on by a breathless radio announcer: “What a crowd! It’s bedlam, folks. Can the police hold them?” Bedlam indeed ensues, and as the mob panics a child is beaten to death, Homer Simpson is killed, and Tod breaks his leg. John Schlesinger memorably captured the ensuing riot in his 1975 film adaptation.
YouTube Screen Shot © Paramount (1975)
The social conditions that lay behind West’s dystopian vision—an America wracked by ethnic and class strife exacerbated by the Great Depression and imminent world war—make the showbiz struggles of the book’s characters all the more pitiful; the slick productions of the film industry only distract them from the hopelessness of their lives.
Was West really thinking of Ensor’s Christ Entering Brussels when conceiving his novel? He couldn’t have seen the painting in person, as it was hidden in Ensor’s home in Ostend, Belgium, throughout the author’s life. But West was a painter in his youth and had studied art history in college in the 1920s; he surely knew reproductions of the famous painting in books, such as the full-page one printed in Grégoire Le Roy’s major monograph published in 1922.
Reproduction of Christ’s Entry into Brussels in Grégoire Le Roy’s monograph James Ensor (1922)
The Day of the Locust itself offers the most compelling evidence that West knew the painting. During the riot at the movie premiere, Tod’s delirious thoughts turn to his own unfinished painting, its imagery now melding in his mind with the surrounding chaos: “Through the center, winding from left to right, was a long hill street and down it, spilling into the middle foreground, came the mob carrying baseball bats and torches. […] They were marching behind a banner in a great united front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land. No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames.” Baseball bats and torches notwithstanding, this is a pretty good description of Christ Entering Brussels.
Whatever James Ensor’s original intention, his great canvas—like all enduring works of art—has accumulated meanings that resonate at different moments in history. Nathanael West, who died in 1940, the year after The Day of the Locust was published, no doubt would have found it fitting that the painting now forms part of the cultural fabric of Los Angeles.
This particularly violent clip from the R-rated movie, The Day of the Locust, should not have been shown without a warning and it is questionable as to whether it should have been shown at all.
Thank you for this feedback. The story has been updated.
I, personally would like to see the movie.
Dottie
The film is available for streaming on Amazon Prime
Methinks you’re stretching a bit. Ensor was a Belgian baron, and pretty disgusted by the hypocrisy and extreme wealth of the late 19th century Belgian bourgeoisie. The painting shows this, with Christ entering Brussels instead of Jerusalem. The imagery looks clearly back to Breughel and Bosch, and the color and brush technique are post-impressionist. It was 1889, what?
Ensor’s paintings follow this style until more or less WWI, and these paintings are much more sought after than his later works. It is indeed a strange work in the Getty, about as odd as Van Gogh’s irises. I doubt that either of the paintings would’ve attracted J. Paul Getty much, but when you have a museum board with a dotation that they didn’t know how to spend, you get some odd bedfellows. In any case, it’s one hell of a painting!
Isn’t this painting about unrecognized talent? It could apply to any place where a
prophet is not recognized. Hollywood fills the bill.
Ensor was not appreciated and depicted himself as Christ.
Kind
of a where’s Waldo with Christ being Waldo.
One wonders as the protagonist Tod Hackett, a set painter, plans his revenge entitled “The Burning of Los Angeles” if author Nathaniel West was familiar with the famous “Burning of Atlanta” of scene in Gone With the Wind. The famous crane shot over the devastation was under the direction of art director William Cameron Menzies in December, 1938. Unforgettable and haunting as Ensor’s painting.
It’s an interesting suggestion; the apocalyptic nature of the burning of Atlanta sequence in Gone with the Wind certainly calls to mind some of the imagery in the novel. But the timing doesn’t add up: West had written the book earlier in 1938 (it was published in May 1939) and the movie wasn’t released until December 1939.
Interesting that the Getty chooses to highlight the magnificent Ensor painting in its newsletter after making the tone deaf choice to move it from a suitable location to a virtually unviewable location in a room cluttered with unrelated objects and high above the visitors heads.
I’m sorry you don’t like the current installation; I think it looks rather great. One reason that the painting is in the new location is that the sculptures in the same room are all by artists–such as Rodin, Claudel, Minne, and others–very much of Ensor’s time and sensibility.
The only “real-looking” person in the painting is the fellow in the bottom-right corner being eyed suspiciously by one of the characters. Any chance that’s the artist?
If you’re referring to the man in profile, with a white wig, the answer is very likely not. The features don’t resemble Ensor’s. In fact, some scholars identify that figure as the Marquis de Sade…
The two figures lower right in the corner are most probably “portraits” of Ernest Renan and David Friedrich Strauss, two famous theologians who published on the figure of Jesus.
Ernest Renan, French, published ‘Vie de Jésus’, which was reviewed in L’Art moderne, Ensor read. David Friedrich Strauss published ‘Das Leben Jesus’, which was translated into French by Renan.
Until now nobody made this possible identification….
Very thin and highly speculative without any real foundation. Why did he “surely knew reproductions of the famous painting”? Is it known that West had that particular book or had taken classes in which it was assigned or referenced?
I might agree with “speculative,” but surely not “highly speculative!” There is plenty of evidence from West’s contemporaries–including the writer Josephine Herbst, his good friend–that West admired Ensor’s paintings. West was very sophisticated on matters of art, as Jay Martin’s excellent 1970 biography attests: as an art student at Brown (both studio and art history), he was known on capmus for his caricatures; he spent several months in Paris in 1926-27, meeting Surrealist and Dada artists, including Max Ernst. The Day of the Locust itself has many references to artists (Goya and Daumier, for example, though not Ensor). But for me the imagery of the novel–the descriptions of several of the characters and two “set-pieces” (the Battle of Waterloo scene and the riot at the film premiere) are so evocative of Ensor as to make the relationship extremely compelling–compelling enough, at least, for a blog post!
My study on The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 was published a few months ago by Pandora Publishers (Antwerp), with the support of Bart Versluys. The Director of the Getty Museum, Mr. Timothy Potts, kindly wrote a preface for my book. It is richly illustrated with unknown documents, art works, and photographs. I hope my book will give a “larger view” of the painting. Lucky Los Angeles!
Xavier Tricot
Rietstraat 72
8400 Ostend
Belgium