After 1850, sensational images were to be found everywhere: in books and magazines, and newspapers and advertisements of every sort. Born in 1891, Max Ernst was a child of this revolution. He would take advantage of his culture and visual memories in 1933 deciding, when the Surrealist movement was at its height, to use a number of old illustrations for his own purposes. He used Sade and Fantomas, Dore and Grandville as sources as well as the covers of detective stories. The book that came out of this brilliant plundering in 1934 - without text and consisted of one part for each day of the week - clearly shows how the 20th century took inspiration from its predecessor.

30 June - 13 September 2009

Forgotten, discredited even, for many decades, Art Nouveau was rehabilitated in the 1960s in a way that affected the history of art and the art market as much as contemporary creative work (design and graphics). There were many reasons for this revival: tributes paid by the Surrealists in the 1930s, the Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition organised by the MoMA in 1940, major exhibitions put on in New York (Art Nouveau. Art and Design at the Turn of the Century, MoMA, 1959), and in Paris (Les sources du XXe siecle, Musee National d'Art Moderne, 1960). However, it is not a question of determining the reasons for this renaissance, but of comparing Art Nouveau creations with creative output from 1950 to 1970, in order to highlight the influences expressed in very varied and sometimes unexpected areas, such as furnishings, fashion, advertising, films and even the psychedelic aesthetic.

20 October 2009 - 4 February 2010

Continuity comes from the Naturalism and Symbolism that influenced his early work, as well as the tradition of masks, disguise, grotesque and satire, and carnival, a legacy from his childhood in Ostend, a city to which he was deeply attached. Fracture is the dramatisation of the use of colour and light. It is also the invention of a new language where the words intrude unsubtly alongside images, in order to give meaning to ideas, and the invention of a new narrative system teeming with characters and actions. Through his scathing irony, his sense of derision and self-derision, his intense colours and his expressiveness, Ensor, a strange and unclassifiable painter, finds his place amongst the precursors of Expressionism.

20 October 2009 - 4 February 2010