The Belgian painter James Ensor is the outsider artist who made it in. An isolated and splenetic man, contemptuous of both authority and the human herd, always feuding with the world and licking his wounds, he ended up all the same with money, royal honors and a secure if peculiar foothold in art history. There's a major Ensor show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City this summer. It focuses just on work from the two decades after 1880, when he was in his 20s and 30s, but, no surprise, those were the years we love him for,...
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