This Fall, Institutions in Belgium Celebrate Artist James Ensor

Sitting on the Flemish coast, the city of Ostend in Belgium overlooks the English Channel, its miles of beaches making it a popular seaside resort since the first half of the 19th century. It’s also known for a yearly carnival attracting masked revelers whose presence lends a macabre air to Ostend’s otherwise picturesque character—which, in any case, conceals an oft violent past.

Originally settled in the early Middle Ages, Ostend became a fortified stronghold during the 15th century thanks to a vital maritime location that made it a flash point of conflict. Between 1601 and 1604, the town was besieged by Spain during Holland’s rebellion against the Hapsburg crown, with cannonades hurled daily against its walls. The dead on both sides totaled six figures, leaving human remains that were still being discovered well into the 20th century.

Adding to the body count, an explosion at a local ammunition dump in 1827 left dozens of casualties. During World War I a German U-boat base in Ostend was assaulted by the Royal Navy, and in World War II Britain rained incendiary bombs on the city when it was once again occupied by Germany.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration, then, to say that Ostend has been a stately bourgeois pleasure dome haunted by the dead, its dark undercurrent very much suffusing the art of its most illustrious son, the painter James Ensor (1860–1949).

A contemporary of both the Post-Impressionists and the Symbolists, Ensor didn’t fit into either category, being instead a precursor of two of the 20th-century’s most important and influential movements: Expressionism and Surrealism. Ensor transformed Charles Baudelaire’s call to paint modern life into a kind of Twilight Zone of the Belle Epoque, where corruptions of spirit and flesh, imminent mortality, and eschatological forebodings of the future were ever present.

One can see as much in Ensor’s sardonic 1888 etching My Portrait in 1960, in which he depicts himself as a supine skeleton, moldering on the ground on the centenary of his birth. While he called the image a “simple anticipation” of his ultimate destiny, it seems more than serendipitous that the date corresponds to the height of cold war fears about nuclear Armageddon. In this piece Ensor could be said to be both literally and figuratively ahead of his time, and the same was true of the rest of his oeuvre.

This year marks 75 years since the artist’s death at 89, an anniversary being celebrated by several Ensor exhibitions, including a major survey that recently opened at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp (through January 19, 2025). Given the occasion, the time is ripe to revisit Ensor’s place in art history and the ways in which he shaped it.

ENSOR 2024 shows this fall:
“Ostend, Ensor’s Imaginary Paradise,” the Venetian Galleries, Ostend, through October 27, 2024.
“James Ensor: Satire, Parody, Pastiche,” James Ensor House, Ostend, through January 12, 2025.
“Ensor’s Wildest Dreams,” KMSKA, Antwerp, through January 18, 2025
“Masquerade, Makeup & Ensor,” MoMu, Antwerp, through February 2, 2025
“Cindy Sherman: Anti-Fashion” FOMU, Antwerp, through February 2, 2025

 

 

 

Source:https://www.artnews.com/

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