Death and the Masks

James Ensor painted this crush of carnival masks around a grinning skull in 1897, in the Belgian resort town of Ostend, where his family kept a shop full of the very masks and curios that fill his work. The picture then had a strange second life. A German museum in Mannheim bought it, and in 1937 the Nazi regime pulled it from the walls as degenerate art. It was sold off at a now-famous auction in Lucerne in 1939, where the city of Liege bought it, which is why it hangs there today. Ensor gives death a candle and a crowd of leering false faces, with two reapers chasing a hot-air balloon in the sky behind. He was making private jokes about mortality that a later state would take very literally.