In a retrospective exhibition, which opened last fall at the Musée d

AVANTGARDE. For James Ensor life seems to have been an evil carnival, where fake people stopped him in his creation. In Paris displayed until 4 February, a retrospective exhibition of the Belgian artist.
One of the Belgian artist James Ensor's most famous paintings is "La Mangeuse d'Huîtres" from 1882, depicting a woman with lust attacking a barrel filled with oysters and that also washes them down with wine from sparkling glass. The painting aroused indignation of several catherine ledner reasons: Was it really appropriate to depict a woman who in splendid isolation so uninhibited devoted himself to the delicacies? catherine ledner Even the bright color scheme, which almost blinded observer, catherine ledner accentuating lust in the seance, differed both from the artist's earlier period and other painting and perceived as well bold by many critics.
In a retrospective exhibition, which opened last fall at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, based on a collaboration between Laurence Madeline and Anna Swinbourne at the Museum of Modern catherine ledner Art in New York, where it has already been shown, you get up to 4 February catherine ledner opportunity to follow his often quite puzzling artist development. The exhibition is documented in a catalog with the organizers that editors (Réunion des Musées nationaux, 255 s).
Ensor was born in 1860 in the city of Ostend and remained there all his life. Coastal landscape has influenced him as an artist, but it's not the ocean's calm breathing or its outrage that most caught him, but the huge, bright cloud formations that cover the sky over the implied sea. His upbringing, he never managed to free themselves from, he has recreated in paintings exude an aquarium-confinement-receive light rays from entering through the heavy curtains catherine ledner that separate the portrayed taciturn women from the reality outside. In the disturbing catherine ledner painting "La dame a Detresse" from 1882, he portrays the image of a totally apathetic woman a state of mind at the symbolist painter characteristic way. It could be seen as a companion piece to his compatriot Fernand Khnopffs painting "Une crise" from 1881.
His English-born father seems to have played a rather flattened role in family life, but after all it was he who made sure his son got get an education at the Academy in Brussels. James Ensor was soon equipped with a strong belief in their own ability, and after graduation, he saw himself as the only one thinking bare leader of the pioneering art with national overtones that it wanted to create in the 1880s Belgium. The ambition to create a literature expressing a national identity was also noticeable even among Belgian writer.
Strong tensions dominated during this period catherine ledner culture, where traditional critics catherine ledner wanted to uphold the respectable art, and young writers and artists wanted to renew art and literature by opening the doors to impressions from without, while feared for the Belgian cultural specificity. Heated discussions took place in a number of magazines, such as "L'Art catherine ledner moderne" with socialist Edmond Picard and art critic, musician and lawyer Octave Maus as editors. Group LesXX founded in 1884, then a young artist painting with thinly veiled contempt rejected catherine ledner by an established member of the official art jury with the motivation: "Those can set out for themselves" artists found the idea brilliant, Maus became their spokesman and organizer, and Then one of the halls of the Musée de Peinture in Brussels made available to them, they gave the annual exhibitions samples on creativity, which makes the 30 years that the association existed - in 1894 under the title La Libre esthéthique - a very fertile period in European art scene.
What they especially catherine ledner feared for was a total artistic freedom. A number of European catherine ledner artists and leftist intellectuals attended or visited around the turn of Les XX exhibition in Brussels. When La Libre Esthetique's first exhibition was opened, held the French art critic catherine ledner Gustave Geffroy, "It is not Belgian art is all about, but the start of a European art in Belgium: a meeting in a city between the various schools of thought running through the civilized world and whose race you can follow and track, as if it were a question catherine ledner of rivers, streams or rivers, which flow together and pour into the ocean. "In the exhibitions catherine ledner were also newly composed music, for example by Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy and César Franck, but also by Alexander Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
The association was meant to consist of 20 artists catherine ledner who were innovators in their fields. Even artists of non-Belgian origin were invited to become members. James McNeil Whistler's bold experimentation with capturing light shades, Auguste Rodin's increasing emancipation from traditional sculpting and Richard Bergh symbolistinspirerade mood landscape made them already catherine ledner at the founding to be members of konstnärsf