Félix Labisse

Félix Labisse was a French painter, illustrator and stage designer. He was of Flemish and Polish descent and worked in both France and Belgium. On a visit to Ostend in 1922, he met James Ensor, with whom he established a lifelong friendship with. In 1927 he set up his studio in Ostend, where he was associated not only with Ensor, but also with Constant Permeke and Léon Spilliaert, and with the poets Henri van de Putte, Jean Tuegels and Michel de Ghelderode, and the film maker Henri Storck. 

Labisse was self-taught and strongly influenced by Ensor. He sought to render both his own poetic reveries and the preoccupations of modern life through a technique of smoothly painted and strongly outlined violent colors. He specialized in images of a particular type of woman, at once strangely sensual and cold, whom he painted in blue and other exaggerated hues and who haunted his pictures like mythical goddesses. In 1928 he he and Storck founded the Ciné Club in Osten, which disseminated avant-garde films by Man Ray, Carl Drayer and Fritz Lang. Labisse also made a film of his own, "La Mort de Vénus".