page_title: James Ensor
section_title: Influence and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: James Ensor / Influence and legacy
caption_attribution_description: Bal du rat mort
context_page_description: James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor 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.
context_section_description: 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."
  The yearly philanthropic "Bal du Rat mort" (Dead Rat Ball) in Ostend continues a tradition begun by Ensor and his friends in 1898.
  His 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 the Museum voor Schone Kunsten 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.
  Ensor has been paid homage by contemporary painters and artists in other media: he is the subject of a song, "Meet James Ensor", recorded in 1994 by the alternative rock duo They Might Be Giants. The 1996 Belgian movie, Camping Cosmos, was inspired by drawings of James Ensor, in particular Carnaval sur la plage (1887), La mort poursuivant le troupeau des humains (1896), and Le bal fantastique (1889). The film's director, Jan Bucquoy, is also the creator of a comic Le Bal du Rat mort inspired by Ensor.
  An exhibition of approximately 120 works by James Ensor was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2009, and then at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, October 2009 – February 2010. The Getty mounted a similar exhibition June–September 2014. The Art Institute of Chicago exhibited Ensor's 1887 masterpiece The Temptation of St. Anthony from November 2014 through January 2015, along with other important paintings and etchings. From October 2016 through January 2017, the Royal Academy of Arts in London hosted a major exhibition of Ensor's paintings and etchings, curated by the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans. The black artist Kara Walker painted a controversial work, "Christ's Entry into Journalism", inspired by Ensor in 2017.
caption: The annual Bal du Rat mort (Dead Rat Ball) is held in Ostend.
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