What James Ensor Knew About the Masks We Wear

In our age of cheek fillers, makeup contouring and Snapchat filters, the face we show the world is often not our own. When it is this simple to manipulate how we look through cosmetics and digital media, have our masks become our selves?

As unlikely as it may seem, James Ensor, a Belgian painter born in 1860, may have understood our lust for masking long before these face manipulation tools came along. Ensor painted figures whose real faces are grotesquely covered, and their new guises reveal their ugliest traits. His works offer us a society full of clowns, who know little about themselves.

The case for Ensor’s prescience is being made this month in Antwerp, Belgium, where several simultaneous exhibitions are exploring the artist’s fascination with masks and masquerade as part of the 75th anniversary commemorations of Ensor’s death. Although he isn’t an international household name like his contemporaries Claude Monet, Edward Munch or Vincent van Gogh, at home in Belgium, Ensor is revered as a national treasure.

Antwerp’s Royal Museum of Fine Arts, or K.S.M.K.A., which owns the largest collection of Ensor’s paintings, is presenting the lead exhibition of the commemorations, “In Your Wildest Dreams: Ensor Beyond Impressionism,” which runs through Jan. 19, 2025.

Herwig Todts, a modern art curator at K.M.S.K.A., said he wanted to show that Ensor was a “game changer,” who used Impressionist brushwork techniques and colors, but then pushed them into new realms of avant-garde expressionism.

One of Ensor’s most famous works, his 1890 picture “The Intrigue,” on display at K.S.M.K.A., hovers somewhere between the realistic and the Expressionist: It might be a group-portrait of carnival merrymakers, or a congregation of ghouls.