A major James Ensor show opened at the
MoMA in New York, where – incidentally – until July 27 you can still go see a number of installations questioning the nature of reality and subverting the traditional relationship between viewer and viewed by contemporary Dutch artist
Aernout Mik, on June 28.
Ensor (1860–1949), the Ostend ‘prince of painters’, was a Flemish artist of considerable stature and along with Gauguin, Van Gogh and Munch a pioneer of modern European art and an important precursor to the development of Expressionism.
This exhibition investigates Ensor’s artistic influence and presents approximately 120 works that, according to the press release, show the painter’s ‘contribution to modernity, his innovative and allegorical use of light, his prominent use of satire, his deep interest in carnival and performance, and his own self-fashioning and use of masking, travesty, and role-playing.’ To this end, the paintings, prints, and drawings are positioned in an overlapping network of themes and images to produce a complete picture of the master’s bold oeuvre. The exhibition, which has
Flanders House, the new Flemish cultural forum in the US as its lead sponsor, wants to present ‘a socially engaged and self-critical artist involved with the issues of his times and with contemporary debates on the very nature of modernism’.
Last Friday, Holland Cotter described Ensor as a classic insider-outsider in The New York Times: part of the art canon, yet also artistically homeless. Fugitive, volatile and hard to pin down, Ensor was certainly a true and literal ‘eccentric’ who labored away from the cultural hotspots where artistic reputations were made. Cotter calls him ‘an aggrieved traditionalist with a pop culture itch’, thus referring to the mixture of high and low culture, of the sublime and the popular in the magical mystery tour de force that Ensor’s work ultimately is. It is no coincidence that in the 1990 High & Low: High Art and Popular Culture exhibition at the very same Museum of Modern Art the man from Ostend rubbed shoulders with the likes of Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein and Cindy Sherman.
Cotter’s guess is that a lot of people know Ensor's name without knowing quite who he is. Therefore this exhibition is a fine chance to take this wise advice from a 1994 They Might Be Giants song to heart: ‘Meet James Ensor / Belgium's famous painter / Dig him up and shake his hand / Appreciate the man’.
James Ensor. A retrospective of the Painter continues through September 21 at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition, which is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, will travel to the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, October 2009–February 2010. You can shake hands virtually with the artist here.
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