2024 is dedicated to James Ensor in Flanders and Brussels in Belgium when it will be 75 years since the death of this Ostend great master. Ostend and Antwerp are joining forces for a fascinating and complementary Ensor year. From December 2023 to August 2024, Ostend is presenting a museum program and a varied city festival in honor of Ensor.

Until 14.04.2024, Mu.ZEE, the museum in Ostend, Belgium, specializing in Belgian art from 1830 onwards is staging the exhibition Rose, Rose, Rose à mes yeux – James Ensor en het stilleven in België 1830 – 1930. The exhibition, curated by Prof. Bart Verschaffel and Sabine Taevernier, focuses entirely on James Ensor’s still-life works for the first time. Some thirty works from Ensor’s significant production in this area – from the first bourgeois examples to the ‘haunted’ still life works of the 1990s to the ethereal, dreamy examples of the late period – serve as the backbone and calibration for an overview of still life in Belgium between 1830 and 1930. In this period, various talented painters are looking for ways to recharge the genre, which has become an ostentatious, decorative genre without artistic commitment, both in pictorial and iconographic terms. Here, Ensor illustrates the general trend and his own exceptional quality at the same time.

The exhibition first provides an overview of the 19th century, academic, and decorative tradition from Antoine Wiertz to Frans Mortelmans, with many forgotten but highly skilled and in their time highly successful painters such as Jean Robie and Hubert Bellis. Particular attention is paid to totally forgotten female painters such as Alice Ronner and Georgette Meunier, as well as the isolated figure of Henri De Braekeleer. This is followed by a selection of painters who, already within the accepted tradition of modernism, focus on still life, but themselves continue to adhere to the customs of the genre such as Louis Thevenet and Léon De Smet. In addition, several painters are included who, like Ensor, create highly personal, powerful images using their pictorial approach and image composition such as Leon Spilliaert, Gustave Van de Woestyne, Frits Van den Berghe and the much less well-known Marthe Donas and Walter Vaes. The exhibition concludes with artists who blow up the fixed image space of the ‘theatre of things’: Jean Brusselmans and René Magritte.

The exhibition welcomes loans from, among others, the Kunsthalle Mannheim, Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, our two museum partners the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp and from numerous public institutions and private collections from, among others, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Monaco.

The exhibition is also accompanied by a publication published by Mercatorfonds Publishers with, in addition to the catalog of exhibited works, contributions on the meaning of still life in the oeuvre of James Ensor and the history of still life in Belgium. The catalog is available in Dutch, French or English.