Word: ensor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...middle age, a Belgian painter named James Ensor once complained that he was "infected with respectability." It bothered him, he said, that well-bred young ladies who used to turn their backs on him "now smile at me with all their teeth." But if Ensor became respectable, it was the age that had changed, not Ensor. He kept on painting some of the most ghoulishly disagreeable canvases of modern times-and heard himself hailed as Belgium's greatest 20th-century artist. Last week, two years after his death at 89, Manhattan's Museum of Modern...
Belgium's most famous modern artist, Baron James Ensor, was 89 when he died last year. He had crammed his house with souvenirs that ranged from a cigar butt once left there by Belgium's King Albert to a great painting done by Ensor himself 62 years ago: The Entry of Christ into Brussels...
...picture had so shocked his contemporaries that they refused to exhibit it even in avant-garde shows. Ensor resolved to enjoy his masterpiece himself, hung it in an upstairs room and admired it daily. Publicly shown for the first time in 1929, it was hailed as a brilliant "expressionist" picture foreshadowing the works of Max Beckmann and Paul Klee. Connoisseurs clustered around the picture like cattle at a salt lick, but while he lived, Ensor refused to part with it. Last week it went for $40.000 to an Ostend casino proprietor named Gustave Nellens...