James Ensor (1860-1949) is one of those artists whose name is fairly familiar, but whose work hovers in a mental netherworld of art history. So MoMA’s overview of this Belgian artist offers welcome insight into his weird, intriguing oeuvre that overlapped many influential movements and artists before nestling most comfortably with the expressionists of the early 20th century. The show, which runs June 28–Sept 21 and was organized by Anna Swinbourne, the museum’s assistant curator of painting and sculpture, is ordered chronologically and comprises about 120 works. Most were done in the 1880s and 90s, the decades of his richest output that saw the rapid location, refinement, and evolution of his voice.

It’s easy to play the association game while looking at his early stuff in which he honed his technique—streetscapes/Monet; still lifes/Cézanne; full, flattened figure/Manet; interiors bathed with northern European light/Vermeer; and so on. Paintings that showed he had mastered traditional painting technique featured not society types but regular folk, such as in The Oyster Eater (1882) and The Drunkards (1883).

In the mid-1880s, what would become signature motifs began creeping into his sketches and compositions. read more