James Ensor, 1860-1949

James Ensor, 1860-1949

Author: Ulrike Becks-Malorny

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13:

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It was never a sure thing that James Ensor, the great Belgian painter of macabre and ghoulish scenes, would become a nationally revered figure. James Ensor was unusual in many ways. Apart from his training in Brussels, he spent his entire long life in Ostend, seemingly the opposite of cosmopolitan. Later on he was expelled by the group Les XX for a particularly controversial canvas: The Entry of Christ into Brussels, which he had painted in 1889. An expressionist before the term was coined, he used the iconography of masks and skeletons to point up the essential horrors of life, and often underwrote his images with a sardonic gallows humour. It has been said that he appropriated the subject matter of a Bosch or Bruegel and revisioned them using the techniques of Manet or Rubens. But this is to diminish his own unique take on both art and experience. A genuine maverick in the way that so many Belgian artists are (lest we forget Magritte), James Ensor can claim a dark and distinctive place in the art histories of the last hundred years.


James Ensor

James Ensor

Author: Patricia G. Berman

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 9780892366415

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The brash young artist James Ensor painted Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 during a period of extraordinary artistic and political fomentation in his native Belgium. It is one of the most dazzling, innovative, and perplexing paintings created in Europe in the late nineteenth century, rivaling any work of its period in audacity and ambition. Huge in scale, complex in design and execution, and brimming with social commentary, the startling canvas presents a scene filled with clowns, masked figures, and--barely visible amid the swirling crowds--the tiny figure of Christ on a donkey entering the city of Brussels. This insightful volume examines the painting in light of Belgium's rich artistic, social, political, and theological debates in the late nineteenth century, and in the context of James Ensor's exceptional career, in order to decipher some of the painting's messages and meanings.


The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice

The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice

Author: Susan M. Canning

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-10-20

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1501339230

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“Vive la Sociale”: This rousing, revolutionary statement, written on a bright red banner across the top of James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889, served as a visual manifesto and call to action by the Belgian artist (1860-1949), one that announced with an insistent, public voice the centrality of his art practice to the cultural discourse of modern Belgium. This provocative declaration serves as the title for this new study of Ensor's art focusing on its social discourse and the artist's interaction with and at times satirical encounter with his contemporary milieu. Rather than the alienated and traumatized Expressionist given preference in modern art history, Ensor is presented here as an artist of agency and purpose whose art practice engaged the issues and concerns of middle class Belgian life, society and politics and was informed by the values and class, race and gendered perspectives of his time. Ensor's radical vision and oppositional strategy of resistance, self-fashioning and performance remains relevant. This book with its timely, nuanced reading of the art and career of this often misunderstood “artist's artist”, invites a re-evaluation not only of Ensor's social context and expressive critique but also his unique contribution to modernist art practice.


Syd Barrett & Pink Floyd

Syd Barrett & Pink Floyd

Author: Julian Palacios

Publisher: Plexus Publishing

Published: 2015-06-29

Total Pages: 841

ISBN-13: 0859658821

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Syd Barrett was an English composer and purveyor of some of the most intriguing music ever written. Famous before his twentieth birthday, Barrett led the charge of psychedelia onstage at London's famed UFO club. With a Fender Telecaster and a primitive Binson echo unit, Barrett liberated the guitar from being, in critic Simon Reynolds' words, 'a riff machine, and turned it into a texture and timbre generator.' His inspired celestial flights of improvisation, and his more structured and whimsical short songs indicated a mind of unusual inventiveness. Chief in Barrett's mind was a Zen-like insistence on spontaneity; each performance had to be unique, and Barrett strived to push his music farther and farther out into the zone of complete abstraction. This in-depth analysis of Pink Floyd founding member Syd Barrett's life and work is the product of years of extensive research. Lost in the Woods traces Syd's swift evolution from precocious young art student to acid-fuelled psychedelic rock star, and examines the myriad musical and literary influences that he utilised in composing his hypnotic, groundbreaking songs. A never-forgotten casualty of the excesses, innovations, and idealism of the 1960s, Syd Barrett is one of the most heavily mythologized men in rock, and Lost in the Woods offers a rare portrayal of a unique spirit in freefall.


The Mediatization of the Artist

The Mediatization of the Artist

Author: Rachel Esner

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-01-31

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 3319662309

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This book offers trans-historical and trans-national perspectives on the image of “the artist” as a public figure in the popular discourse and imagination. Since the rise of notions of artistic autonomy and the simultaneous demise of old systems of patronage from the late eighteenth century onwards, artists have increasingly found themselves confronted with the necessity of developing a public persona. In the same period, new audiences for art discovered their fascination for the life and work of the artist. The rise of new media such as the illustrated press, photography and film meant that the needs of both parties could easily be satisfied in both words and images. Thanks to these “new” media, the artist was transformed from a simple producer of works of art into a public figure. The aim of this volume is to reflect on this transformative process, and to study the specific role of the media themselves. Which visual media were deployed, to what effect, and with what kind of audiences in mind? How did the artist, critic, photographer and filmmaker interact in the creation of these representations of the artist’s image?


Staging the Artist

Staging the Artist

Author: Claire Moran

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1351547860

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Restoring the role of theatrical performance as both subject and trope in the aesthetics of self-representation, Staging the Artist questions how nineteenth-century French and Belgian artists self-consciously fashioned their identities through their art and writings. This emphasis on performance allows for a new understanding of the processes of self-fashioning which underlie self-representation in word and image. Claire Moran offers new interpretations of works by major nineteenth-century figures such as Paul Gauguin and Edgar Degas, and addresses the neglected topic of the function of theatre in the development of modern visual art. Incarnating Baudelaire's metaphor of the artist as an actor ever-conscious of his role, the artists discussed "Courbet, Ensor and Van Gogh, among others" employed theatre as both a thematic source and formal inspiration in their painting, writings and social behaviour. Moran argues that what renders this visual, literary and social performance modern is its self-consciousness, which in turn serves as a model with which to challenge pictorial convention. This book suggests that tracing modern performance and artistic identity to the nineteenth century provides a greater understanding not only of the significance of theatre in the development of modern art, but also highlights the self-conscious staging inherent to modern artistic identity.