Theatre of Masks

James Ensor grew up over a shop in the seaside town of Ostend, on the Belgian coast, where his family sold souvenirs, seashells, and carnival masks to holidaymakers. Those masks became his whole language. In this stage scene from 1889 the performers wear them, and so does the crowd watching from below, until it is impossible to say where the show ends and the audience begins. Everyone is in disguise, and the disguises are grotesque, set down in the sharp, acidic colours he favoured. Ostend held a famous carnival, and Ensor folded its processions and its cheap shop masks into pictures the Brussels avant-garde of the 1880s struggled to accept. He had just finished his huge canvas of Christ entering modern Brussels among a masked mob, and he clearly liked this arrangement of a masked stage, because he came back to it more than once. A smaller version of the very same scene hangs today in Madrid.