Arty Farty Friday ~ 2 artists born 13 April, both with "scandalous" reputations.

Glancing down the list of births on 13 April, through the decades, I noticed two artists whose work had been considered by many as scandalous: James Ensor and Pierre Molinier. The two artists were born 40 years apart, Ensor in Belgium in 1860, Molinier in Agen, France, in 1900.

In his final decades, James Ensor was an international celebrity showered with official honors in his native Belgium. But in the 1880s and 1890s, the young Ensor was a scandalous and defiant figure.

This was a period of great social and political unrest in Belgium, and also of incredible cultural ferment. Bursting with mad creativity sparked by the latest developments in the avant-garde, Ensor freely mined artistic sources both high and low, old and new, familiar and exotic, and oscillated unpredictably between painting, drawing, and printmaking. From an advanced mode of naturalism in step with broader European trends, Ensor's art quickly morphed into something so fantastic, bizarre, grotesque, and satirical that even his avant-garde peers had difficulty accepting it. To this day, Ensor's art continues to baffle in its psychological complexity, internal contradictions, and sheer eccentricity.

http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/scandalous_ensor/index.html

An account of French artist Pierre Molinier’s colourful life reads like that of the protagonist in an Oscar Wilde novel. A product of France’s oft-fictionalised fin de siècle degeneration, Molinier defied all societal norms to live a life of hedonistic excess. Both homosexual and a transvestite in an era when both were frowned upon – he asbcribed himself the title of ‘lesbienne’ – Molinier pursued fetishism and the latent eroticism of the subconscious mind to its most extreme degree......................
By 1955 Molinier had begun a fruitful correspondence with André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, who dubbed him 'the magician of erotic art' and decided to include his sensual, and at times violent, works in the International Surrealist Exhibition. This marked the artist’s official induction into the movement, and he soon earned a reputation as an artist who would dare to execute the ideas his reputable contemporaries, who included the likes of Salvador Dalí, only dreamt of.

His investigation into fetishism and depravity, both through painting and photography, steadily gathered momentum, culminating in an extensive series of portraits and self-portraits in which Molinier himself often features as a many-limbed woman, a dominatrix, or a devil. When his dwindling health prompted his death at the age of 76, it was executed with the all the charisma his character would suggest; a great lover of guns, he died from a single self-inflicted gunshot wound.
http://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/8019/the-forbidden-photo-collages-of-pierre-molinier

James Ensor, 13 April 1860, Ostend, Belgium at 4.30AM.

Pierre Molinier, 13 April 1900, Agen, France at 8.00AM.

There aren't many clear similarities. The obvious factor in Ensor's chart, reflecting his rather rebellious and uncompromising style is Venus(planet of the arts) conjunct Uranus (planet of the unexpected and the rebel). In addition Neptune, planet of creativity, dreams and the mysterious was sitting right on his rising degree - if time of birth is correct at Astrodatabank - it has AA rating so is reliable.


In Molinier's case, data from Astrodatabank, also AA rated, look at the chart shape as a start! It's made up of oppositions forming a cross, and involving the important points in a natal chart: the ascendant/descendant, mid-heaven and nadir! Oppositions can signify irreconcilable differences in a personality, or sometimes a kind of balancing act, an effort to reconcile opposites. Molinier had Pluto (eroticism, intensity) sitting close to his Gemini rising degree, with Venus and Neptune in Gemini also - what better "trade mark" for his style? In opposition to the Gemini planets are Uranus and Jupiter, an excess of the unexpected/futuristic, perhaps attempted balancing of the artist's runaway sexual intensity with an excess of the unexpected, using avant garde methods of photography.

Their common Aries Sun position seems secondary!

Arty Farty Friday ~ Darkness at the Fin de Siècle

 The Dangerous Cooks by James Ensor 1896

This article from the BBC's website is an interesting read.

The Dark Side of the Belle Époque

Art at the turn of the last century was not all sun-kissed Monet gardens. It was a time of angst and decadence, expressed through some truly disturbing paintings, writes Fisun Güner:

SNIPS

When we think about art at the end of the 19th Century, who and what comes to mind? Monet and Impressionism, certainly. Toulouse-Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge, perhaps. Post-Impressionism, of course: Cézanne and his heavy-set card players or Mont Sainte-Victoire shimmering on the horizon, magnificent and majestic; Gauguin in his Tahitian paradise; or the last ravishing landscapes of Van Gogh, who died just as the last decade of the century ­was getting into its stride.

Art at the end of the 19th Century is as far removed from Monet’s sun-dappled garden as you can get

But when we think of the art that’s actually characterised as the art of the fin de siècle, particularly the last decade of that century, the mood changes, and it darkens. We think of the art of anxiety and angst, of drama and febrile tension, of an acute sense of alienation.

So why did artists revel in such outward expressions of unease and dislocation? In an era of relative peace and stability and, for the few, economic prosperity (an era named, after the destruction of the Great War, as the Belle Époque or Golden Age and which stretched from the 1870s to the war’s outbreak) the art of fin-de-siècle Europe expressed something contrary to those outward signs of confidence. These were anxieties connected with a sense of society’s spiritual emptiness and its growing materialism. This was a rejection of the idea that progress and reason, ideas which intellectuals had embraced and promoted since the 18th Century as Enlightenment ideals, could sustain the spirit.

It signalled a deeper anxiety: our inability to control our own destinies.

But perhaps, in a way, these were also anxieties exacerbated by the end of any century. It might sound a trivial connection, but in our own age we might think back to the alarm over the Millennium Bug, where people actually imagined planes falling out of the sky due to programs having accommodated only two digits instead of four (computers would think, when the hour struck, they were back in 1900).

It signalled a deeper anxiety that is perennial: our inability to know and control our own destinies. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? the title from an 1897 painting by Gauguin, seemed to capture this quest for that deeper knowledge – and he and many other artists of the time looked for answers not in science but in esoteric spirituality, in mysticism and often the occult.

Click on image for better view

 Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?   by  Paul Gauguin.

Several artists mentioned in the piece have been featured in Arty Farty Friday posts in the past - among others:

James Ensor
Aubrey Beardsley
Munch and Lautrec
Paul Gauguin

Astrologically, around the turn of 19/20th century, Neptune and Pluto were often conjuct and in communicative Gemini, while Saturn and Uranus were both traversing Scorpio. The four outermost planets, then, carried tinges of paranoia, via Pluto and Scorpio, and "fed" them into the communal atmosphere.

Arty Farty Friday: James Ensor - Neptune in Pisces Ascending

James Ensor didn't have natal Sun in Pisces, but he did have Neptune, modern ruler of Pisces, slap-bang on his ascendant. He was born on 13 April 1860 at 4:30 am in Ostend, Belgium (data from Astrodatabank AA rating = very reliable). Chart and notes on the astrology follow at the end of this post.

A band called They Might be Giants once wrote a song about this artist:





Meet James Ensor
Belgium's famous painter
Dig him up and shake his hand
Appreciate the man

Before there were junk stores
Before there was junk
He lived with his mother and the torments of Christ
The world was transformed
A crowd gathered round
Pressed against his window so they could be the first

To meet James Ensor
Belgium's famous painter
Raise a glass and sit and stare
Understand the man

He lost all his friends
He didn't need his friends
He lived with his mother and repeated himself
The world has forgotten
The world moved along
The crowd at his window went back to their homes

Meet James Ensor
Meet James Ensor
Belgium's famous painter
Dig him up and shake his hand
Appreciate the man.


I enjoyed a 2009 piece on this artist by Elatia Harris at 3 Quarks Daily - James Ensor: Keepin' It Surreal. Or there's Pariah to Paragon - James Ensor and the Carnivalesque by Bryce Dwyer at University of Tampa's Journal of Art History. Or Wikipedia's page on the artist.

In a nutshell, for the greater part of his life Ensor was not an artist embraced by the elite of late 19th century art world. He was an outsider, made little attempt to change this, remained in the city of his birth, living and working in a studio in the home of his parents. He did come to be accepted later in life, but from what I've read, such public acceptance seemed to mark a decrease in, or complete loss of, the sharp insights in that strange style which eventually brought him recognition. Perhaps he had thrived on, and revelled in simply being an outsider, but once his work became widely accepted something within him retreated.

His earliest work was fairly mainline, fairly unremarkable, then his paintings seemed to veer into a kind of raging madness, and his style stayed somewhere out there where the buses didn't run. His paintings are filled with masks and skeletons, or unpleasant images. I understand these were depressing commentaries on the human condition as he saw it from the vantage point of his hometown, Ostend, a city on the North Sea coast of Belgium. Belgian history, and maybe his own mortality must have conjured such morbid visions. Human bones were regularly uncovered in Ostend, residue of the carnage there during seventeenth-century warfare; Ensor possibly retained memories of their exhumation. His 1888 etching (below) of himself as a skeleton, reclining in slippers bears the title My Portrait in 1960.

A few more examples of his work.........

 Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889

 The Frightful Musicians

Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring

Ensor seemed to enjoy painting self portraits -19th century version of a "selfie" I suppose - three of these follow:

 Self Portrait with Flowered Hat

 Detail from Self Portrait with Masks

 Ensor at the Harmonium

With regard to his art style, Neptune in Pisces on the ascendant and Uranus conjunct Venus in Gemini is really all there is to say!

His dream or nightmare-like scenes, masks, illusions (Pisces Neptune), off-the-wall subject matter (Uranus) in his art (Venus) - the most unpleasant of which I have not posted. For example there's a painting Doctrinal Nourishment [Alimentation Doctrinaire], 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. (See HERE)

Ensor's apparent need to stay on the outside of the art world's bubble, to be different, to appear eccentric clearly relates to Uranus conjunct Venus.

“Drenched in British purples, I have offered up my tones: pigeon breast, hind belly, balky mule lung, monkey bottom pink, lapis lazuli and malachite, excited nymph thigh, panther pee-pee, high-smelling hen hair, hedgehog in aspic, barrel-maker's brothel, revered rose, monkeybush, turkey-like white, sly violet, page's slipper, immaculate nun spring, unspeakable red, Ensor azure, affected yellow, mummy skull, rock-hard gray, brunt celadon, shop soiled smoke ring.”
~ James Ensor, "James Ensor"