1890 (ca.), James Ensor, Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 -- Getty Museum (Los Angeles)
From the museum label: Flouting convention with its thick paint, clashing colors, and crude caricatures, Ensor's satirical masterpiece imagines how the citizens of Brussels would respond to the Second Coming of Christ. Paying little heed to Jesus on his donkey, the carnivalesque crowd surges down a gigantic boulevard in a procession led by buffoonish representatives of the church, military, and bourgeoisie. Slogans on jostling banners and flags evoke official civic and religious events as well as mass political demonstrations. A fierce individualist who identified with Christ as a persecuted revolutionary, Ensor signals his cynical distance from mindless groupthink through a placard reading "Fanfares Doctrinaires / Toujours Réussi" (roughly, "Dogmatic fanfares always succeed").
1890 (ca.), James Ensor, Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 -- Getty Museum (Los Angeles)
From the museum label: Flouting convention with its thick paint, clashing colors, and crude caricatures, Ensor's satirical masterpiece imagines how the citizens of Brussels would respond to the Second Coming of Christ. Paying little heed to Jesus on his donkey, the carnivalesque crowd surges down a gigantic boulevard in a procession led by buffoonish representatives of the church, military, and bourgeoisie. Slogans on jostling banners and flags evoke official civic and religious events as well as mass political demonstrations. A fierce individualist who identified with Christ as a persecuted revolutionary, Ensor signals his cynical distance from mindless groupthink through a placard reading "Fanfares Doctrinaires / Toujours Réussi" (roughly, "Dogmatic fanfares always succeed").