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“Vive la Sociale”: This rousing, revolutionary statement, written on a bright red banner across the top of James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889, served as a visual manifesto and call to action by the Belgian artist (1860-1949), one that announced with an insistent, public voice the centrality of his art practice to the cultural discourse of modern Belgium. This provocative declaration serves as the title for this new study of Ensor's art focusing on its social discourse and the artist's interaction with and at times satirical encounter with his contemporary milieu. Rather than the alienated and traumatized Expressionist given preference in modern art history, Ensor is presented here as an artist of agency and purpose whose art practice engaged the issues and concerns of middle class Belgian life, society and politics and was informed by the values and class, race and gendered perspectives of his time. Ensor's radical vision and oppositional strategy of resistance, self-fashioning and performance remains relevant. This book with its timely, nuanced reading of the art and career of this often misunderstood “artist's artist”, invites a re-evaluation not only of Ensor's social context and expressive critique but also his unique contribution to modernist art practice.
The brash young artist James Ensor painted Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 during a period of extraordinary artistic and political fomentation in his native Belgium. It is one of the most dazzling, innovative, and perplexing paintings created in Europe in the late nineteenth century, rivaling any work of its period in audacity and ambition. Huge in scale, complex in design and execution, and brimming with social commentary, the startling canvas presents a scene filled with clowns, masked figures, and--barely visible amid the swirling crowds--the tiny figure of Christ on a donkey entering the city of Brussels. This insightful volume examines the painting in light of Belgium's rich artistic, social, political, and theological debates in the late nineteenth century, and in the context of James Ensor's exceptional career, in order to decipher some of the painting's messages and meanings.
It was never a sure thing that James Ensor, the great Belgian painter of macabre and ghoulish scenes, would become a nationally revered figure. James Ensor was unusual in many ways. Apart from his training in Brussels, he spent his entire long life in Ostend, seemingly the opposite of cosmopolitan. Later on he was expelled by the group Les XX for a particularly controversial canvas: The Entry of Christ into Brussels, which he had painted in 1889. An expressionist before the term was coined, he used the iconography of masks and skeletons to point up the essential horrors of life, and often underwrote his images with a sardonic gallows humour. It has been said that he appropriated the subject matter of a Bosch or Bruegel and revisioned them using the techniques of Manet or Rubens. But this is to diminish his own unique take on both art and experience. A genuine maverick in the way that so many Belgian artists are (lest we forget Magritte), James Ensor can claim a dark and distinctive place in the art histories of the last hundred years.
Restoring the role of theatrical performance as both subject and trope in the aesthetics of self-representation, Staging the Artist questions how nineteenth-century French and Belgian artists self-consciously fashioned their identities through their art and writings. This emphasis on performance allows for a new understanding of the processes of self-fashioning which underlie self-representation in word and image. Claire Moran offers new interpretations of works by major nineteenth-century figures such as Paul Gauguin and Edgar Degas, and addresses the neglected topic of the function of theatre in the development of modern visual art. Incarnating Baudelaire's metaphor of the artist as an actor ever-conscious of his role, the artists discussed "Courbet, Ensor and Van Gogh, among others" employed theatre as both a thematic source and formal inspiration in their painting, writings and social behaviour. Moran argues that what renders this visual, literary and social performance modern is its self-consciousness, which in turn serves as a model with which to challenge pictorial convention. This book suggests that tracing modern performance and artistic identity to the nineteenth century provides a greater understanding not only of the significance of theatre in the development of modern art, but also highlights the self-conscious staging inherent to modern artistic identity.
Surrealists appeared in the aftermath of World War I with a bang: revolution of thought, creativity, and the wish to break away from the past and all that was left in ruins.This refusal to integrate into the bourgeois society was also a leitmotiv of Dada artists, and André Breton asserted that Dada does not produce perspective. Surrealism emerged amidst such feeling. Surrealists and Dada artists often changed from one movement to another.They were united by their superior intellectualism and the common goal to break free from the norm. Describing the Surrealists with their aversive resistance to the system, the author brings a new approach which strives to be relative and truthful. Provocation and cultural revolution: aren’t Surrealists after all just a direct product of creative individualism in this unsettled period?
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Avaryan Resplendent Arrows of the Sun The Spear of Heaven The Tides of Darkness Here in a single volume is the second trilogy of Judith Tarr’s novels about the world of Avaryan, and the Sun God’s children who rule it. The Sunborn's heirs have ruled the two empires for four generations, but the newest Emperor of Endros and Asanion does not sit easily. The Golden Palace is full of plot and intrigue, and conspirators who plan to kill Estarion, as they killed his father, and take the throne for their own. The Emperor Estarion’s willful granddaughter, and heir to the throne, has wheedled permission to travel with the Master of the Mage Guild to a high mountain kingdom at the end of the chain of World Gates. But once inside the Kingdom of Heaven, mere magery will meet its match. The power of the Sun Lords will be needed counter the Breaker of Gates. A chill wave of dark sorcery sweeps across a thousand worlds, turning souls without number into mute, blind slaves. In a desperate attempt to halt the shadow's relentless spread, the Sunborn’s heir must join her formidable powers with those of a wild and untrained young mage who has stolen her heart.