James Ensor was a Belgian painter and graphic artist who also produced paintings as an etcher and printmaker. He was a prominent figure of Expressionism and Surrealism, as well as of Impressionism. Ensor's style is full of grotesque and fantasy.
Background
Ethnicity:
Ensor's father was a son of the English who lived in Brussels, Belgium. The painter's mother came from Belgium.
James Ensor was born on April 13, 1860 in Ostend, Belgium. He was a son of James Frederic Ensor, a seller who owned a souvenir shop, and Maria Catherina Haegheman. Ensor had a sister and aunt.
Education
James Ensor attended the College Notre-Dame in Ostend for two years but left it in 1875 having no big interest in formal disciplines. While studying, the boy revealed a talent for painting and soon, after leaving the College, became a trainee of two Ostend painters, Michel Thomas Anthony Van Cuyck and Edouard Dubar, both watercolorists.
Before entering the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts (Royal Academy of Fine Arts) in Brussels in 1877, Ensor painted landscapes of Ostend surroundings. He studied at the Academy for three years under such teachers, as Joseph Stallaert, Alexandre Robert, and Jef Van Severdonck.
James Ensor didn't accept the formal teaching methods of the Academy and named the institution an "establishment of the short-sighted." Under the influence of Dutch baroque painting and French impressionism, he produced creative paintings with divided brushstroke instead of traditional ones that often caused scandals. However, James continued his education by painting from live models. While in the Academy, Ensor met other artists with liberal minds, including Fernand Khnopff, Théo van Rysselberghe, Guillaume Van Strydonck, and Theo Hannon.
James Ensor’s painting career started in 1880 in the attic studio which had been located above his parents' house for thirty-seven years.
The paintings that the artist produced living there belong to the so-called "somber period" which lasted five years. Ensor reflected the realistic middle-class interiors of his family house. Russian Music (1881) and The Drunkards (1883) are among the works of the period.
In 1883, Ensor became a founding member of the artistic group called Les Vingt consisting of Belgian avant-garde painters, designers, and sculptors. The year was also marked by the artist's interest in light and fantasy characteristic for Impressionism. The pictures James Ensor created the next fifteen years, also known as "light period," depicted the grotesque world of carnivals and its attributes such as masks sold in his family's shop or skeletons, the overtly fantastic images with which his art is generally associated. The Scandalized Masks (1883), Skeletons Fighting over a Hanged Man (1891) and Haunted Furniture (1885; destroyed) are the most iconic canvases of the time. The works exhibited at Les Vingt's first show in 1884 seemed too innovative for the artistic group and received many bad reviews from critics. Although dispirited, Ensor continued to work.
The next period in James Ensor's career, from 1888 to 1892, was characterized by his turning to religious topics, often related with the life and torments of Christ. One of his most remarkable works of this time was the huge Christ's Entry Into Brussels (1889). It was named "a forerunner of twentieth-century Expressionism." Simultaneously, the painter fell into the production of his first etchings and prints, such as The Cathedral (1886) or the political ones Doctrinal Nourishment and Belgium in the XIXth Century or King Dindon, both of 1889.
It was at the turn of the 20th century, when James Ensor's painting activity decreased and he mostly repeated his earlier works than created the new compositions, that he finally received the tardy acclaim. Known as the "crystalline period," the painter's final period, it included such remarkable works as The Artist's Mother in Death (1915) and The Vile Vivisectors (1925).
At the end of his career, James Ensor took an interest in music. Although having no musical education, he composed brilliantly on the harmonium and performed for visitors.
Old Lady with Blue Shawl (The Artist's Grandmother)
The Dangerous Cooks
Hell Under, Hell Above, Hell All Around
Calvary
The Girl with Masks
The Vengeance of Hop Frog
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
At the Conservatory
Views
James Ensor expressed his detestation for the inhumanity of the world through his religious paintings.
Quotations:
"Reason and nature are the enemy of the artist."
"Let us abandon ourselves without pause to the pure kiss of the air, the benefits of the sea, let us nourish our thoughts before our bodies, taste the fruits of space, the perfume and sounds of colors, let us sublimate our ideas."
"My art tends toward the literacy. My pictures tend toward the outskirts of painting: But why generalize? It is possible to realize one thing or another, according to the impressions gained from one point of view or another. But it is too difficult to make a general rule."
"Finally, hemmed in by followers, I have happily confined myself to a solitary milieu where the mask is enthroned full of violence, light and splendor. For me the mask means Freshness of tone, overly shrilled expression, sumptuous scene, great unexpected gestures, reckless movements, exquisite turbulence."
"Yes, my intention is to go on working for a long time yet so that generations to come may hear me. My intention is to survive, and I think of the solid coper plate, the unalterable ink, easy reproduction, faithful prints, and I adopt etching as a means of expression."
"I do not impose impressions. I attach no importance to labels. I don't like adjectives."
"Van Cuyck and Dubar, both pickled and oily, professorially initiated me to the disappointing commonplaces of their dreary, stillborn, and stubborn craft."
"Vision changes while it observes."
Membership
James Ensor was a founding member of the Free Academy of Belgium in 1901. In 1925, the artist became a member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium.
Free Academy of Belgium
,
Belgium
1901
Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium
,
Belgium
1925
Personality
James Ensor's sole contact with the world around him was through the medium of his art, which reflected the imagery of his eccentric, morose broodings. Even still life paintings and landscapes appear strangely menacing, imbued with the erotic, sadistic, and self-tormenting qualities of Ensor's narrative paintings.
Quotes from others about the person
"Ensor is the leader of a clan. Ensor is the limelight. Ensor sums up and concentrates certain principles which are considered to be anarchistic. In short, Ensor is a dangerous person who has great changes. [...] He is consequently marked for blows. It is at him that all the harquebuses are aimed. It is on his head that are dumped the most aromatic containers of the so-called serious critics." - Octave Maus, Belgian art critic
"James Ensor's signature style – his radical distortion of form, his ambiguous space, his riotous color, his muddled surfaces, and his proclivity for the bizarre – both anticipated and influenced modernist movements from symbolism and German expressionism to dada and surrealism." - Michael Govan, Chief Operating Officer of Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Interests
music
Connections
James Ensor had a life partner, Augusta Boogaerts, a salesgirl in his family's souvenir shop. The painter never married her because his parents were against their relationships. However, the couple was together until the end of the artist's life.
James Ensor by Luc Tuymans
The volume, published to accompany a major exhibition, explore Ensorùs life and legacy and contains comments of leading contemporary artist Luc Tuymans on his selection of Ensor’s works, offering a distinctive view of Ensor, one only another artist can provide.
2016
James Ensor: The Temptation of Saint Anthony
This engaging volume describes the creation and restoration of the extraordinary large-scale drawing of James Ensor, The Temptation of Saint Anthony.
James Ensor: Life and Work
The book offers an illuminating introduction to the artist's life and oeuvre, accompanied by a selection of fifty representative works, each comprising a large, colour reproduction and an art-historical commentary.
2007
James Ensor: Theatre of Masks
Covers the full scope of the work of James Ensor setting the scene with early work made in his hometown of Ostend and focusing on significant themes such as his identification with the figure of Christ, among others. Includes extracts from his own writings.