James Ensor

PRESS PREVIEW: Tuesday, June 23, 2009, 10:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. (Invitation to follow.) NEW YORK, April 28, 2009—The Museum of Modern Art presents James Ensor—the first exhibition at an American institution to feature the full range of his media in over 30 years. James Ensor (Belgian, 1860–1949) was a major figure in the Belgian avant-garde of the late nineteenth century and an important precursor to the development of Expressionism in the early twentieth. In both respects, he has influenced generations of later artists.

Approximately 120 of Ensor’s paintings, drawings, and prints are included in the exhibition, most of which date from the artist’s creative peak, 1880 to the mid-1890s. A number of them, including the first two drawings from his monumental Aureoles series of 1885-86, The Lively and Radiant: The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem and The Rising: Christ Shown to the People, have never before been seen in the United States.

Though perhaps best known for his evocative paintings of masks, in portraits and fictive dramas, Ensor’s wide-ranging oeuvre spans such traditional subject matter as still life, landscape, and religious symbolism to more singular visions, including fantastical scenes featuring skeletons and other startling figures, such as Skeletons Trying to Warm Themselves (1889) and Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring (1891).

Ensor’s work also includes a wide range of styles and dimensions, from tiny prints of only a few inches to large-scale paintings and drawings. A restless and incessant experimenter with a variety of mediums and techniques including collage and hand-printed etching, Ensor even revisited works completed years earlier, adding colors and images that often radically transformed the originals. The exhibition will produce a complete picture of Ensor’s daring, experiential body of work, and will elucidate Ensor’s contribution to modern art, 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. Ultimately, the exhibition presents Ensor as a socially engaged and self-critical artist involved with the issues of his times and with contemporary debates on the nature of modernism.

PUBLICATION: The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue edited by Anna Swinborne, Assistant Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA. It includes essays by Anna Swinbourne; Susan M. Canning, Professor of Art History, College of New Rochelle, New York; Michel Draguet, Director, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels; Robert Hoozee, Director, Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent; and Herwig Todts, Curator, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp; Laurence Madeline, Curator, Musée d’Orsay, Paris; and Jane Panetta, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art. It is published by The Museum of Modern Art and is available at MoMA Stores and online at www.momastore.org. It is distributed to the trade through Distributed Art Publishers (D.A.P) in the United States and Canada, and Thames + Hudson outside North America. Hardcover: 208 pages, 165 color illustrations.

ORGANIZATION: Anna Swinbourne, Assistant Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art

TRAVEL: James Ensor will travel to the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, where it will be on view from October 19, 2009 to February 4, 2010.

James Ensor
Kurator: Anna Swinbourne

Stationen:
28.06.09 - 21.09.09 Museum of Modern Art, New York
19.10.09 - 04.02.10 Musée d´Orsay, Paris