James Ensor seems to have slipped between the cracks. An innovative Belgian artist who was influential in shaping expressionism and surrealism, he is often overlooked. This is especially true in America, where his work is thinly scattered across a number of museums and largely ignored.

Ensor’s renown may be about to change. The artist’s first big American show for 30 years, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), is intended to reassert his place in the canon. But just where he belongs remains a mystery. The works on view, which range from cartoonish drawings of religious scenes to bright little paintings of fighting skeletons, reveal that, if nothing else, Ensor was certainly something of an oddball. “He is very slippery,” explains Anna Swinbourne, who organised the exhibition and edited the catalogue. “Was he a forbear of expressive use of colour? Of modern caricature? The more you research, the less you know.”

Born in 1860 in the Belgian seaside resort town of Ostend, Ensor (whose fame as an artist at home is surpassed only by that of René Magritte and Hergé, the creator of Tintin) painted his coastal surroundings with a sure, naturalistic hand. By the age of 17 he was off to Brussels to study at the prestigious Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. But after three years he returned to Ostend, irked by academic officialdom and rich with avant-garde connections. Ensor made his artist’s studio in the attic of his family’s home, where his mother ran a souvenir shop selling beach trinkets and masks for the annual carnival. He never married and rarely left Ostend again.

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