James Ensor [antikvár]

Red Apples and White Bowl, 1883 Oil on canvas, 23Va" X 29V2" (60 x 75 cm.) Private collection A ROAD WITH MANY TURNINGS James Ensor is known to the public as a painter of masks and skeletons. This is true to such an extent that his masquerades and macabre figures sometimes cause one to forget that he did a great many other things — that he was very much more than that. Yet the unusual and the fantastic constitute only one of the many aspects of his work, whose principal virtue is its exceptional diversity. Few painters have been capable of achieving greater variety in their art than he, of finding renewed inspiration and fresh forms, of intensifying their experimentation and adventuring into unexplored territories, each one very different from the other. A multifaceted artist, curious about everything, prodigiously inventive, of unparalleled boldness, and a man ahead of his time, this innovator, whose imagination was incredibly fertile, tried every kind of artistic endeavor and expressed himself in many ways, invariably displaying a stunning originality. The multiplicity of his ideas and the eclecticism of his compositions can be explained by the painter's origins and environment. He was clearly a product of the rich Flemish earth, the earth