In Your Wildest Dreams

Ensor Beyond Impressionism

Autumn 2024 sees James Ensor take over the museum with one of the largest exhibitions to be devoted to him in Belgium since 1999. Not only will you have the opportunity to delve into Ensor’s wondrous realm of turbulent visions, masks and satire, we will also show him alongside the work of international artists who inspired him and with whom he set out to compete. Because if there was one thing Ensor wanted, it was always to be the best; even if those rivals had names like Claude Monet, Edvard Munch or even Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya.

The KMSKA boasts the largest and most varied Ensor collection anywhere in the world and is also home to the Ensor Research Project – the leading centre for the study of this modern master. All of which makes the museum the ideal venue for the all-round exploration of the artist offered by Ensor’s Wildest Dreams.

Ensor wanted nothing less than to become Belgium’s leading avant-garde artist. He sought to achieve this by introducing French Impressionism into his work, but he did not actually know a great deal about the technique. In the period 1880–85 he ended up developing his own version of Impressionism, which actually owed more to the Realism of Courbet and Raffaëlli. It was during those years that he painted works like Bourgeois Interior and The Oyster Eater. When he actually saw the work of Degas, Monet, Renoir and Pissarro in 1886, he decided to change direction completely. As far as the exhibition is concerned, that pivotal moment marked the true beginning of Ensor’s varied oeuvre.

In Your Wildest Dreams

Ensor embarked on his new artistic adventure in 1887 with the painting Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise and his drawing of The Temptation of St Anthony (Art Institute of Chicago). He applied his paint unmixed, straight from tube to canvas, achieving an expressive power all of his own, with 101 nuances of colour. His penchant for the strange resulted in a visual language that was grotesque and frightening. The painter juggled images at once hilarious and hellish, of the kind you normally only see in your wildest dreams. Where Ensor had previously been an artist who constantly broke the rules, he now set about rewriting them entirely. Like a true game-changer, Ensor allowed himself to run wild.

Ensor Beyond Impressionism

Ensor’s attempts to unite humour and horror led to his most eye-catching contribution to the birth of Modernism. He began to paint canvases featuring imaginary mask-creatures. Other artists in the 19th century had done something similar, notably Munch and Nolde. But their masks were a decorative element or an enigmatic means of concealing a person’s identity. Ensor was the first to use them in order to reveal the human being’s true nature. This was his invention.

The art of James Ensor is steeped in the late-19th-century satirical humour beloved of sophisticated circles in Brussels and Paris. The exhibition firmly shows him from his most satirical side.

Ensor Year

The exhibition will form part of the Ensor Year in 2024 – the 75th anniversary of the artist’s death. But the avant-garde painter lives on in Antwerp, home to the world’s largest collection of his work. Beginning in September 2024, several of the city’s museums will highlight Ensor’s oeuvre in a series of ambitious exhibitions. The focus will be on the artist’s continuing relevance through cross-fertilization with contemporary art, fashion and photography. A perfect match, in other words, for the many other cultural assets that Antwerp has to offer all year round. Discover Ensor from some surprising angles, as both an innovator and a true game-changer. Because he was so much more than simply the ‘mask-painter’ he called himself.