The story
Mu.ZEE, the art museum by the sea, sits in a former department store in Ostend, the Belgian resort the locals once called the queen of the seaside towns. It covers Belgian art from 1860 to now, but its soul is two painters the town produced.
James Ensor spent almost his whole life above his family's souvenir shop in Ostend, painting carnival masks, skeletons and jeering crowds in acid colours that unsettled the art world of his day. The museum owns more than two dozen of his paintings, including a self-portrait in a flowered hat. Léon Spilliaert, a generation younger, walked the same seafront at night and turned it into stark, lonely scenes of empty promenades and his own reflected face.
A dedicated wing pairs the two Ostend masters, and the sea they both painted is a two-minute walk from the door.
