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Item No: 25287
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| Keywords: People, Mask, Strange, Figure, Expressionism, German, Symbolism, Surrealism, Figures, Sitting, Sting, Costume, Performers, Clowns, Red, Painting, Expressionism, Modern, Representational, Expressionism, |
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Ensor, James (1860-1949)
James Ensor was born at Ostend, on April 13, 1860. His parents ran four souvenir-curio shops in this seaside resort catering to the English and continental Europeans. Ensor's childhood was spent idling away his time, roaming the dunes of the old port. In the attic in which Ensor made his studio were the damaged and unsold objects from his parent's shop. These objects and an array of masks, which Ensor's parents sold at religious carnivals, became the sources for his art.
In 1877 Ensor entered the Brussels academy where he stayed for three years, drawing and painting. By 1884, he was painting the masks and skeletons which made him famous, and which showed a morbid side to his personality. From his early twenties Ensor's work suggests the suspicion with which he seemed to regard both his fellow man and the inanimate objects with which he was surrounded. His art is filled with images in which men exist only as phantoms or ghosts. In a historical context, Ensor's art reflects the tensions of his time. He exalted rather than minimized these tensions and identified himself with them.
During his lifetime, Ensor's art was misunderstood. A generation later the Surrealists would discover many things in his art including a controlled violence and the ability to express the inexpressible in forms experienced in the dream or comatose state of the subconscious - that would declare him a precursor to their own work. |
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