James Ensor 'Skeletons Warming Themselves' Exhibition Poster

Skeletons Warming Themselves (1889) shows two skeletons huddled around a stove, trying to keep warm, beneath a wall hung with the masks and props of the painter’s own world. It is morbid and quietly funny at once, which is the James Ensor register exactly: even the dead, the picture suggests, cannot get comfortable.

Ensor barely left Ostend. He spent most of his long life above his family’s seaside souvenir and curiosity shop, surrounded by the carnival masks, shells and chinoiserie they sold to tourists, and that inventory crawled straight into his paintings. He turned the Belgian middle class into grotesque masked crowds and gave his skeletons thoroughly human occupations: squabbling over a hanged man, fighting over a herring, warming their bones at a stove. His colour stayed bright and his touch theatrical even at his most macabre.

His work was too strange for the Brussels avant-garde group Les XX, to which he belonged and which nearly expelled him, yet he anticipated both Expressionism and Surrealism by decades. Recognition came late and then abundantly: the wild man of Ostend was eventually made a baron by the King of Belgium, a national treasure still living above the shop.

Our poster imagines a July 1962 exhibition, Les Squelettes, at Galerie du Portique on Rue Rabelais in Paris. The design keeps Ensor’s eerie, high-keyed composition intact and frames it with the understated typography of an early-1960s French gallery announcement.

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