James Ensor

Georg Baselitz Rene Magritte Claude Monet Paul Delvaux James Ensor German Parliament to Return Nazi-Looted Portrait Season Opens Softly at Christie’s The Purveyor of Modern Life

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The macabre, burlesque figures and hallucinatory scenes that characterize the work of James Ensor (1860-1949) have earned the Belgian artist critical recognition as an important precursor to the Expressionists of the early 20th century. Contemporary artists, such as Georg Baselitz, also cite his influence on them. Yet Ensor’s satires of bourgeois Belgian society brought him mixed reviews from the avant-garde of his day, some of whom deemed the religious subject matter he often incorporated in his paintings and prints retrograde and out of step with modern depictions of urban life. One of Ensor’s most famous works, L’Entrée du Christ à Bruxelles en 1889, 1888-89, was also one of his most controversial. In the painting, which — largely because of its unpopularity — he kept hidden in his studio until his death, the artist cast himself as Christ riding a donkey in the midst of a carnival-like mob in the Belgian capital. The J. Paul Getty Museum, where the picture now hangs, is rumored to have paid the formidable sum of around $27 million for it in 1987.

Although museums worldwide have pursued Ensor’s work, art lovers in the U.S. have not had the opportunity to see his oeuvre in depth until now, in his first full-scale retrospective in more than 30 years, on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through September 21 (after which it travels to the Musée d’Orsay, Paris). The MoMA show focuses on paintings from 1880 to the mid-1890s, generally regarded as Ensor’s most inventive period.

The retrospective follows another major Ensor landmark achieved earlier this year. In February his large 1892 canvas of a sad clown taunted by garish masked figures, Le désespoir de Pierrot, set a new auction record for the artist, fetching €4,993,000 ($6.3 million) in the Christie’s Paris sale of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. The painting had everything going for it: monumental format, iconic Ensor imagery, an early, coveted date and an impeccable celebrity pedigree. It shattered Ensor’s previous record of £733,250 ($1.3 million), paid at Christie’s London in 2004 for Les bons juges, 1891, a sardonic caricature of Belgium’s so-called good judges. "Time will tell if we match the price of the Yves Saint Laurent picture," says Guy Bennett, head of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s at the time of the sale. "But for someone of such art-historic importance, Ensor is very undervalued. These proto-Surrealist fantasy environments he painted pre-1900, during the throes of Post-Impressionism, were done decades before you saw anything like this."

Ensor was born in the seaside town of Ostend, where his family owned a souvenir shop crammed with puppets, masks, shells, stuffed animals and fans. He received little encouragement at the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, which he attended from 1877 to 1880 before returning to Ostend to set up a studio in the attic of his family’s shop. In 1883, after being rejected by official academic salons, Ensor cofounded Les Vingt, a progressive artists’ society that put on its own annual exhibitions, showing Monet, Seurat and Whistler, among other non-Belgian modernists.

Ensor’s closely observed, atmospheric landscapes and interiors from the early 1880s veered into the imaginary realm beginning in 1885. Arranging masks and puppets from the shop and skulls propped on broomsticks around his studio, he invented fantastical dramas, street scenes and caricatures, often evoking political or religious allegories. The work he created over the next decade was a breakthrough for the artist and is the most sought after today. It alienated him, however, from Les Vingt, whose members, by 1887, had become enamored of Seurat and his Neo-Impressionist pictures of everyday life. Increasingly marginalized, Ensor delved deeper into his own universe.

According to his catalogue raisonné, published in 1992, Ensor painted 838 canvases, including small and unfinished pieces. Nevertheless, major works from early in his career are rarely available. Patrick Derom, whose gallery in Brussels frequently handles Ensor sales, notes that important pre-1900 paintings, when they do surface, are usually snapped up by museums, often in Belgium. In the past two years, Derom has sold Pierrot et squelette en jaune, 1893, for €1.5 million ($2 million) and Les enfants à la toilette, 1886, for €2.8 million ($4.3 million), both to the Museum voor Schone Kunsten, in Ghent. "These prices seem almost modest compared with prices fetched by René Magritte," says Derom, who ranks Ensor with Magritte and Paul Delvaux as Belgium’s finest modern artists.