Word: ensor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...proved largely groundless. The collection's focus is fairly narrow; it was never, Walsh points out, meant to be a "Western Met," an encyclopedic museum. Its collection of painting and sculpture, entirely European, stops at the threshold of the 20th century--the most recent picture in it is James Ensor's huge, pullulating satire, The Entry of Christ into Brussels...
Stylish, in fact, hardly begins to describe Florine Stettheimer's work. It is besotted with style as an end in itself, and its delight in quotation naturally endears it to postmodernist taste. Sometimes it's tea-party Ensor, without the bilious satire; sometimes it's Rus sian ballet. There are traces of Elie Nadelman, Odilon Redon, Watteau, Hieronymus Bosch and an over-the-top capriccio of swimmers in some celestial spa titled Natatorium Undine, 1927. Her painting of a spring sale at Henri Bendel's, with ladies squabbling over the merchandise like angry hummingbirds, resembles a Pompeian grotesque translated into...
...some ways his most extreme work comes from this aberrant moment of peinture vache (stupid painting), as he called it -- it's as though, in parodying other Belgian artists (Ensor, and a particularly gross comic illustrator named Deladoes), he touched a demotic rock bottom from which he could only recoil in the end. But Georgette hated the new style, and by 1950 Rene was back to the old one, often repainting versions of images he had first made in the '30s. This recycling fitted his own idea of himself as a craftsman rather than an artist. You could make more...
...perennial cultural struggle between civic boosterism and social derangement. It has been implanted in the city's self-image for at least 60 years, reflected in innumerable films, novels, detective stories, photography. It begins long before Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, 1939, with its Ensor-like cast of pathological misfits and its painter, Tod Hackett, dreaming of his apocalyptic canvas of the burning of the city -- a vision that would be made real by the 1965 Watts riots. It continues long after the movie Blade Runner, 1982. It is not news; but to qualify as news...
...nurturing power of boredom. The son of a Brussels paper wholesaler, Folon quickly came to regard Belgium as "a mental prison, the most boring + place on earth." Art became his means of escape from stifling surroundings, as it was, he suggests, for such other Belgian-born painters as James Ensor and Rene Magritte. Like them, Folon took a strong turn for the fantastic, serving up the quotidian in images dreamy or irreal. But Folon's pictures, compact and whimsical, have always owed more to the purposefully childlike simplicity of Paul Klee than to hallucinatory or surrealistic styles...