2026 № 1 (56)

UDC 7.03

LBC 85.03(4)/85.03(8); 85пр2 53

DOI: 10.51678/2226-0072-2026-1-290-331

For cit.: Loukitcheva K.L. Absurd as the Core of Meaning-Making Strategies in James Ensor’s Work. Hudozhestvennaya kul’tura [Art & Culture Studies], 2026, no. 1, pp. 290–331. https://doi.org/10.51678/2226-0072-2026-1-290-331. (In Russian)

Loukitcheva Krassimira L. 

PhD (in Art History), Assistant Professor, Senior Researcher, Classical Western Art Department, The State Institute for Art Studies, 5 Kozitsky Lane, Moscow, 125375, Russia

https://orcid.org/0009-0002-2731-2824

ResearcherID: KLD-5406-2024

lukicheva@sias.ru 

Absurd as the Core of Meaning-Making Strategies in James Ensor’s Work

Abstract. James Ensor (1860–1949), whose oeuvre lies at the origins of modernism, consistently transforms the semantic functions of the absurd in a number of his works, thereby establishing the foundations for a new stage in the development of this rhetorical device in visual art — a stage that anticipates the artistic practices of existentialism and, subsequently, key aspects of postmodernism. The innovativeness of Ensor’s application of absurd techniques manifests in two distinct directions: first, in experimental engagements with the technical and technological components of painting at the very moment of the artwork’s creation; and second, in a non-trivial synthesis of phantasmagoric imagery and paradoxical functions ascribed by the artist to these figures within the pictorial space. Relying on absurdist techniques, the artist turns to the realm of religion, immerses himself in the flow of everyday life, and initiates deconstructive processes of meaning-making that radically transform modes of visualization, mechanisms of signification, and lead to a systematic inversion of the entire value system. Thus, Ensor transforms absurdity and paradox into instruments of uncompromising analysis, a course that ultimately dismantles the normative-idealized conceptions of humanity and the meaning of its being/existence — still preserved at the philosophical level — which were consolidated in European artistic culture by the figurative systems of the Renaissance and the Early Modern period and received their final formulation in the Enlightenment. In this perspective, Ensor’s oeuvre is examined in comparison with the works of A. Mantegna, J.M.W. Turner, G. Courbet, P. Cézanne, V. van Gogh, G. Seurat, and É. Manet. 

Keywords: James Ensor, symbolism, modernism, Belgian art, absurd, skeleton imagery, mask imagery, religious theme, iconography, everyday life 

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Received 01.10.2025 

Revised 06.01.2026 

Accepted 19.01.2026