James Ensor

W. van den Bussche

Provinciaal Museum voor Moderne Kunst (Ostend, Belgium)

Ensor and the Avant-gardes by the Sea

Musée du Petit Palais (Paris, France)

Musée du Petit Palais, 27 avril-22 juillet 1990

INC. U. S. GAMES SYSTEMS

2 Bridge Deck

Ensor

Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque

Ensor by Himself

Nina Zimmer

Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark

Phantoms, skulls, skeletons, and other macabre figures characterize the oeuvre of James Ensor (1860-1949). His works are bizarre, ironic, occasionally belligerent and provocative, and always buoyed by a profound sense of humor. The unusual motifs reveal what is absurd and grotesque about everyday life. Ensor's interests were wide-ranging; he was as enthusiastic about Rembrandt's prints as he was about the Belgian Carnival festival and Japanese masks. In turn, early 20th-century artists such as Alfred Kubin, Paul Klee, and the German Expressionists Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner were inspired by his creative power and radical rejection of traditional European ideals of beauty. This volume presents nearly sixty paintings and an equal number of drawings, which have been published for the first time.0Exhibition: Ordrupgaard, Charlottenlund, Denmark (6.9.2013-19.1.2014) / Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (16.2.-25.5.2014).

From the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp and Swiss Collections

Exhibition R. S. Johnson International Gallery, Chicago, Fall 1976

Master of Graphic Art--James Ensor, 1860-1949

Art Institute of Chicago

John David Farmer

James Ensor (1860-1949) was a major figure in the Belgian avant-garde of the late nineteenth century and an important precursor to the development of Expressionism in the early twentieth.

M. Catherine de Zegher

Drawing Center (New York, N.Y.)

"Early in his career, Belgian painter James Ensor (1860-1949) broke away from Impressionism, rejecting its prettiness in favor of an original, highly dramatic style. Incorporating elements of satire, caricature, masquerade, and the grotesque, Ensor was a sharp observer of his social and political milieu and a skilled controversialist. Bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and not easily fitting into one particular movement or group, his drawings are increasingly valued for their innovative subjects and techniques, as well as the strong social criticism at their heart. This volume, published to accompany the first major New York exhibition of Ensor's drawings, includes more than one hundred plates, most of them in color. Essays by Susan M. Canning (College of New Rochelle), Marcel De Maeyer (University of Ghent), and Robert Hoozee (Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent), along with a chronology by Xavier Tricot, serve to place Ensor's drawings in the context of both artistic and historical developments of his time and his oeuvre."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Drawings of James Ensor

Between Street and Mirror

Ulrike Becks-Malorny

It was never a sure thing that James Ensor, the great Belgian painter of macabre and ghoulish scenes, would become a nationally revered figure. James Ensor was unusual in many ways. Apart from his training in Brussels, he spent his entire long life in Ostend, seemingly the opposite of cosmopolitan. Later on he was expelled by the group Les XX for a particularly controversial canvas: The Entry of Christ into Brussels, which he had painted in 1889. An expressionist before the term was coined, he used the iconography of masks and skeletons to point up the essential horrors of life, and often underwrote his images with a sardonic gallows humour. It has been said that he appropriated the subject matter of a Bosch or Bruegel and revisioned them using the techniques of Manet or Rubens. But this is to diminish his own unique take on both art and experience. A genuine maverick in the way that so many Belgian artists are (lest we forget Magritte), James Ensor can claim a dark and distinctive place in the art histories of the last hundred years.

Masks, Death and the Sea

James Ensor, 1860-1949

The Prints Of James Ensor

Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Belgium)

Herwig Todts

Few artists of the late nineteenth century produced an oeuvre which is more bizarre, ironic, profound, and rich in interpretive possibilities than that of the Belgian painter James Ensor. His unusual motifs, which became unmistakable symbols of the absurdity of existence, influenced both German Expressionists and French Surrealists. This volume shows all the works from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts of Antwerp.

Paintings and Drawings from the Collection of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp

Patricia G. Berman

Patricia Gray Berman

The brash young artist James Ensor painted Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 during a period of extraordinary artistic and political fomentation in his native Belgium. It is one of the most dazzling, innovative, and perplexing paintings created in Europe in the late nineteenth century, rivaling any work of its period in audacity and ambition. Huge in scale, complex in design and execution, and brimming with social commentary, the startling canvas presents a scene filled with clowns, masked figures, and--barely visible amid the swirling crowds--the tiny figure of Christ on a donkey entering the city of Brussels. This insightful volume examines the painting in light of Belgium's rich artistic, social, political, and theological debates in the late nineteenth century, and in the context of James Ensor's exceptional career, in order to decipher some of the painting's messages and meanings.

Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889

Schirn-Kunsthalle (Frankfurt, Main)

Sabine Bown-Taevernier

James Ensor~ISBN 3-7757-1703-X U.S. $60.00 / Hardcover, 9.5 x 11 in. / 288 pgs / 130 color and 110 b&w. ~Item / March / Art Reason is the enemy of art. --James Ensor

Ostend (Belgium). Museum voor Schone Kunsten

Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Wapenplein, Oostende, 13 April-31 Augustus 1985

Ensor in Oostendse verzamelingen

Susan Marie Canning

Anna Swinbourne

James Ensor's painting of 1887, The Temptation of St Anthony, now in MoMA's collection, established him as one of the boldest painters of his contemporaries. Ensor (1860-1949) was a major figure in the Belgian avant-garde of the late 19th century and an important precursor to the development of Expressionism in the early 20th, yet his work is far too little seen. This striking book, published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, NewYork, gives Ensor the attention he so greatly deserves. Approximately ninety paintings, prints and drawings are featured, creating a complete picture of the artist's daring, experimental oeuvre. Essays examine Ensor's modernity, his innovative and allegorical approach to light, his prominent use of satire, his deep interest in carnival and performance, and finally his own self-fashioning, masking and roleplaying. As the most comprehensive volume on the artist available in English, this remarkable volume reveals Ensor as a socially engaged and self-critical artist involved with the issues of his times and contemporary debates on the very nature of modernism.

J. Paul Getty Museum

Bob Dylan

Brings together two works of art--James Ensor's "Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889" and Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row"

The Superhuman Crew

James Ensor

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