James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor (13 April 1860 – 19 November 1949) was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for most of his life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX.
Ensor is considered to be an innovator in 19th-century art. Although he stood apart from other artists of his time, he significantly influenced such 20th-century artists as Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, George Grosz, Alfred Kubin, Wols, Felix Nussbaum and other expressionist and surrealist painters of the 20th century. As Los Angeles County Museum of Art CEO and Wallis Annenberg director Michael Govan has explained: "James Ensor's signature style—his radical distortion of form, his ambiguous space, his riotous color, his muddled surfaces, and his proclivity for the bizarre—both anticipated and influenced modernist movements from symbolism and German expressionism to dada and surrealism."
Ensor's works are in many public collections, notably the Modern Art Museum of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, and Mu.ZEE in Ostend. Major works by Ensor are also in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. A collection of his letters is held in the Contemporary Art Archives of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels. The Ensor collections of the Flemish fine art museums can all be seen at the James Ensor Online Museum
The yearly philanthropic "Bal du Rat mort" (Dead Rat Ball) in Ostend continues a tradition begun by Ensor and his friends in 1898.
In the movie Halloween (1978), a poster of one of Ensor's self-portraits appears on the wall of a room in Laurie Strode's (Jamie Lee Curtis) home.
The 2024 game "Please, Touch The Artwork 2" is a hidden object game where almost all of the artwork and even some of the game's music are works by Ensor.
In 2024, it is 75 years since the passing of James Ensor (1860 – 1949). Join the celebrations for the life of this renowned Flemish Master with various exhibitions, activities and events in Ostend, Brussels and Antwerp. More info here.