James Ensor at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Niveau 0, Grand espace d’exposition
James Ensor
20 octobre 2009 > 4 février 2010
This exhibition, the first retrospective to be presented in Paris since 1990, aims to show the interplay of fracture and continuity to be found throughout Ensor’s work.
James Ensor
James Ensor
L’Intrigue, 1890
Huile sur toile, 90 x 150 cm
Musée Royal des Beaux Arts, Anvers, Belgique
© ADAGP, Paris 2009
Continuity comes from the Naturalism and Symbolism that influenced his early work, as well as the tradition of masks, disguise, grotesque and satire, and carnival, a legacy from his childhood in Ostend, a city to which he was deeply attached. Fracture is the dramatisation of the use of colour and light.
It is also the invention of a new language where the words intrude unsubtly alongside images, in order to give meaning to ideas, and the invention of a new narrative system teeming with characters and actions.
Through his scathing irony, his sense of derision and self-derision, his intense colours and his expressiveness, Ensor, a strange and unclassifiable painter, finds his place amongst the precursors of Expressionism.
James Ensor
James Ensor
La mort et les masques, 1897
Huile sur toile, 78,5 x 100 cm
Liège, musée d’Art moderne et contemporain
© ADAGP, Paris 2009
This exhibition has been organised by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Musée d’Orsay and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris.
Courtesy Musée d’Orsay
Images © ADAGP, Paris 2009. Tous droits réservés.
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