15. James Ensor
Halfway through his life, in 1905, James Ensor complained about what he called "the absolute condescension of still life!". Ensor considered the genre to be "the triumph of colour and of life".
In the more than two hundred still lifes he painted between 1880 and 1940, we see the entire formal and thematic evolution of his art, as well as how he applied innovation to an academic art and broke through the conventional painting method.
When he painted dark interiors in around 1880, he also painted still lifes with typical objects from a bourgeois interior. Those objects not only demonstrated the class and taste of Ensor's family, but also the importance he attached to matter, light and reflection.
A little later, colour took precedence over light. Shortly after 1886, a theatrical quality emerged. From then on fantasy creatures and masks claim their place in Ensor's works. In his painting, he softened the harshness of his pure, unmixed colours of paint. He achieved this using white backgrounds reminiscent of mother-of-pearl. He was charmed by the shells from his mother's shop, as well as fruit, glasses and porcelain, because of their fanciful shapes. From the mid-1890s until the end of his career, Ensor revisited and transformed the traditional subjects from his early years: colours became lighter and the masks that cropped up sporadically lost some of their menacing character. In this room, you will see how the whole evolution manifests in Ensor's still lifes.