After a remarkable beginning between impressionism and symbolism, James Ensor (1860-1949) was all the worse for the attacks of criticism to which he was subjected from 1885 onwards. Taking a break from the Brussels artistic scene, he returned to Ostend, his native town. In the middle of the shells and...
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After a remarkable beginning between impressionism and symbolism, James Ensor (1860-1949) was all the worse for the attacks of criticism to which he was subjected from 1885 onwards. Taking a break from the Brussels artistic scene, he returned to Ostend, his native town. In the middle of the shells and other curiosities of the family store, he invents a universe between fantastic and grotesque, a world of still lifes with omnipresent masks, interiors populated by skeletons. So many satires of the bourgeois world, parodies of the human condition. His own image not escaping the immense carnival that life is for him, Ensor the eccentric submits to incessant metamorphoses, identifying himself in turn with Rubens, with Christ, with a herring saur ! In complete freedom, and conscious of his singularity, his talent and the misunderstanding he causes.
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