The Dangerous Cooks

By the middle 1890s James Ensor had spent years being mocked and turned away by the Brussels art world, even by the avant-garde society he himself belonged to, which had balked at his enormous Christ's Entry into Brussels. This small panel is his revenge on the critics. He paints them as cooks in a chaotic kitchen, serving up the severed heads of artists on platters, his own head among them, garnished and ready to be carved. The names of real reviewers are worked into the scene. It is grotesque and funny at the same time, done in the harsh, cartoonish hand he had made his own, everything crowded forward as if the whole squabbling kitchen were tipping toward you.