Alimentation Doctrinaire

Doctrinal Nourishment: Art and Anarchism in the Time of James Ensor


Ensor created Doctrinal Nourishment in 1889, at the height of the political instability, economic inequities, and social unrest associated with the monarchy of Belgian King Leopold II (r. 1865–1909). Using caricature, scatological humor, and the deliberate distortion of form, he lampooned the Belgian monarchy, military, government, and clergy as a pack of bloated, self-satisfied tyrants, sitting, bare-bottomed, on a high wall and emptying their bowels into the open mouths of a ravenous crowd. A provocative send-up of authoritarian hubris and a cohesive statement of Ensor’s youthful anarchist views, Doctrinal Nourishment exposed autocratic rule as little more than a foul diet obediently swallowed by the masses, laying bare not only the brutality of Leopold’s regime, but also the people’s blind willingness to accept it.

Ensor’s sources for Doctrinal Nourishment include the political satire and grotesquerie favored by early-nineteenth-century romantic and realist artists. But even as he looked to the past, he also heralded the future, and his work resonates with fin-de-siècle symbolism and anticipates early-twentieth-century German expressionism and dadaism. These avant-garde art movements practiced the subversion of artistic tradition as a viable act of social protest. Ensor, operating firmly in their spirit, developed a strategy of visual insubordination whose target was unchecked authority.

An exploration of Doctrinal Nourishment both in the context of the artist’s oeuvre and the society in which it was produced, this exhibition examines the lively give-and-take between Ensor, his sources, his contemporaries, and his successors, and it gives focus to his pivotal position in the history of modern art.

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Ví este cuadrito (es muy chiquito, quizás 20 cm x 15 cm) que formaba parte de una exposición del autor en el LACMA y no sé, por alguna ignota razón, me hizo acordar de la relación entre los gobernantes de Argentina y su población...