James Ensor's The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 (1888-89, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) is one of the most politically savage and theologically penetrating paintings of the 19th century, a work so controversial that it was refused exhibition for forty years and so visually overwhelming that even now it demands several viewings before its full complexity is legible.
The painting is enormous: nearly four meters high and more than five meters wide, the largest canvas Ensor ever worked on. It depicts a fantasy: what would happen if Christ were to make his triumphal entry (Matthew 21:1-11) into Brussels in Ensor's own time? The answer is expressed in characteristic Ensor style: a massive, swirling, grotesque carnival crowd fills the canvas from edge to edge, with political banners ('Vive La Sociale!' 'Vive Jesus Roi De Bruxelles'), military bands, masked revelers, and the faces of the Belgian bourgeoisie in Ensor's signature mode of masklike caricature. Somewhere in the middle distance, barely visible above the crowd's heads, rides a tiny Christ on a donkey.
The theological critique is multiple and devastating. The triumphal entry in Matthew 21 was itself an ambiguous event: the crowd that shouted 'Hosanna to the Son of David!' (Matthew 21:9) was the same crowd that would shout 'Crucify him!' five days later. Ensor's painting simply extends this ambiguity: the Brussels crowd is not hostile to Christ but has absorbed him into its noise and spectacle, made him one attraction among many, reduced the Son of God to a figure barely distinguishable from the carnival entertainment surrounding him.
This is the critique of Luke 19:40 made visual: if the crowd falls silent, the stones would cry out - because genuine recognition of the divine cannot be manufactured by the crowd, cannot be absorbed into the entertainment economy, cannot be domesticated by political festivity. The stones' cry would be different from the crowd's shout precisely because it would be authentic, coming from the involuntary response of creation rather than the calculated response of politics.
Ensor's use of masks throughout his work was rooted in his upbringing in Ostend, where his parents sold carnival souvenirs, and in his sense that bourgeois social life was itself a masquerade - that the respectable faces of society concealed the same violence and self-interest as the carnival grotesque. Isaiah 29:13 - 'These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me' - is the prophetic text that Ensor's painting visualizes, though not with the dignified restraint of prophetic literature but with the anarchic, riotous energy of someone who has been watching the performance long enough to be thoroughly disgusted by it.
The painting was rejected by the Brussels avant-garde group Les Vingt and not publicly exhibited until 1929. Its influence on Expressionism - on Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and the entire tradition of the mask as social critique in modern art - was enormous, and its theological argument about the crowd's inability to recognize the divine in its midst remains as pointed in the 21st century as it was in the 19th.