Ensor As Etcher

Etching has all the bravura of needlepoint. It helps to be a recluse to master etching. One who was, and did, is James Sydney Ensor, Belgium's premier fantasist of the 20th century, who spent only three of his 89 years of life away from the seaport town of Ostend.

Ensor is, of course, better known for his paintings. His great oil, The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889, painted in 1888, measured 8 1/2 ft. by 14 ft., but he explored the same theme in etchings the size of a shirt cardboard. During his life, Ensor scratched out 133 etchings and drypoints whose quality and diversity rate the Flemish homebody an inglenook in the hall of fame of his great predecessors, Diirer, Rembrandt,

Jacques Callot, Piranesi, Goya and Whistler. The largest collection of Ensor's other art ever assembled in the U.S., a selection of 78 graphics, is now on view at Manhattan's Associated American Artists Galleries.

"All rules, all canons of art vomit death," Ensor said, and his etchings fire from every barrel, trying style after style even within a single year of production. His first plate was done in 1886, when he was only 26, and shows an amazing early technical mastery. By the end of that year, Ensor had ranged in motif from a fine-line portrait of the Swedish botanist Frise to a haggard, almost Hogarthian satire on historical painting in the grand manner, entitled Iston, Pouffamatus, Cracozie and Transmouff, Celebrated Persian Physicians, Examining the Stools of King Darius after the Battle of Arbela. In it, the learned doctors peer into the royal chamber pot for omens.

Ensor sought omens of a different sort in the world he knew. He detested the mob for its human hebetude. Every year, Ostend had a carnival whose revelers, it seemed to him, lost their sense of identity behind their garish masks. Without straying far from his family's souvenir shop, Ensor detailed the seven deadly sins in modern dress, and added a few of his own observation. He often showed Christ not as an object of adoration but as an unmasked redeemer swamped in a sea of masquerade.

"The artist must invent his style," Ensor said, "and each new work demands its own." He could etch the tranquillity of the soaring horizon of the lowlands as did Rembrandt. In one etching of 1888, Stars at the Cemetery, he used sulphur to corrode the copper plate, producing a luminous scumbled blanket like a modern abstractionist. Or equally, Ensor could foretoken the surrealists, as in his ironic view of a flaking skeleton titled My Portrait in 1960,

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