James Ensor
1908
Emile Verhaeren, the great Belgian poet and critic, knew James Ensor intimately, and this 1908 portrait captures a painter unlike any other. Written when Ensor was still at the height of his powers, this book is less a conventional biography than an act of critical sympathy: Verhaeren traces Ensor's dark, brilliant vision back to the windswept streets of Ostend, where English holidaymakers and Flemish tradition collide, where summer crowds give way to winter solitude, and where one man sat surrounded by shells, skeletons, and sardine bones, finding in the grotesque and the comic the true machinery of modern life. Verhaeren illuminates how Ensor's English-Flemish heritage, his family of junk dealers and his loneliness, his misanthropy and his ferocious humor, fused into an art that would later shadow expressionism and surrealism alike. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how place, lineage, and temperament forge a revolutionary sensibility, and why a small seaside town's prodigal son still unsettles us a century later.
