Bart Verschaffel – författare

A unique journey with James Ensor through the history of still life in Belgium in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Still life played an important role within the work of Belgian expressionist and symbolist painter James Ensor (1860–1949). The quality and significance of his intriguingly complex still lifes become clear when placed within the broader development of the genre in Belgium between 1830 and 1930. The book offers an overview of the nineteenth-century Belgian academic tradition of decorative painting, with intriguing work by lesser-known painters such as Jean Robie, Hubert Bellis, Frans Mortelmans, and Henri De Braekeleer, as well as forgotten female artists such as Berthe Art and Alice Ronner. In the early twentieth century, artists such as Louis Thevenet continued to develop the genre of still life in a traditional manner, while innovators such as the late James Ensor, Léon Spilliaert, Marthe Donas, Walter Vaes, and Gustave Van de Woestyne created highly personal interpretations. This book is published on the first exhibition ever entirely devoted to James Ensor's still lifes at Mu.ZEE (Ostend). Distributed for Mercatorfonds

This collection of essays by the Belgian philosopher and theorist Bart Verschaffel, address issues concerning the meaning and relevance of art today.Written over the course of his career, they cover a rich and inventive range of topics, from laughter to the artwork as gift, to splendor and modern beauty. This is the first synoptic collection of Verschaffel's work with many of the essays translated into English for the first time.

An exploration of urban wildlife published by the Lilliput Press.

This book reveals that James Ensor did not develop his fantastic and grotesque universe of masks and skeletons out of his melancholic soul, but that he re-used and transformed an old image tradition that was collected and published by the French author and art critic Jules Champfleury in his History of Caricature. A second essay analyses how these weird creatures infiltrate the image borders and the frames of Ensor's paintings in order to disturb the 'normal' world.

What is real? What is true? Picturing Figures and Faces collects theoretical essays and artists' studies, published between 1988 and 2019, devoted to the artistic representation of the human figure. They deal with the portrait and the death mask, the body and suffering, and with Egon Schiele, René Magritte, Balthus, On Kawara, Paul De Vylder, Jan Vercruysse, Bill Viola, Anthony Gormley, Jan Fabre, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Dirk Braeckman and Elly Strik. The texts are richly illustrated, the book is designed by Antoon De Vylder.