Last Thursday, I visited the Getty Center viewed the retrospective exhibit on James Ensor. Ensor lived in Belgium from 1860 to 1949. Except for a few years in Brussels, he lived most of his life in Ostend, on the English Channel. His most famous painting "Christ's Entry into Brussels" is a part of the permanent exhibit at the Getty. It usually commands a whole wall in a room on the second floor of the West building. It has been moved for the special exhibit. He was creative and sometimes bizarre in his earlier works. He featured figures in grotesque masks, skeletons and used bright colors.
In the evening I attended a panel discussion of three artists who talked about Ensor's impact on their works. They are Marc Trujillo, Tom Knectel, and Laurie Lipton. It seemed that for Ensor's first 40 years of life he was acting out his adolescences through his painting. He then tried to become respectable during his last half century of life and destroyed or altered some of his most provocative works.
Here is a sample of what I saw:
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| "Adam and Eve Expelled from Eden," 1887 |
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| "Afternoon in Ostend," 1881 |
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| "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem," 1885 |
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| "Christ's Entry into Brussels," 1889 |
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| "Doctrinal Nourishment" 1889/1895 |
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| Self Portrait |
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| "The Skeleton Painter," 1896 |
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| "Oysters" |
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| "The Intrigue," 1890 |
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| "The Oyster Eater," 1882 |
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| "Tribulations of Saint Anthony," 1887 |
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| "The Rower," 1883 |
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| Tom Knectel, March Trujillo, and Laurie Lipton discussing Ensor at the Getty |
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