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.
K.M.S.K.A. also loaned a dozen paintings to the Fashion Museum Antwerp, known as MoMu, for “Masquerade, Makeup & Ensor,” (through Feb. 2, 2025). They are displayed alongside the work of contemporary designers and makeup artists to ask: “Why do we wear masks?”
Antwerp’s photography museum, FoMu, is considering Ensor’s love of masquerades from a different, more oblique angle, by focusing on a contemporary artist who has spent nearly a half century working with masks and disguises: Cindy Sherman. Although it is part of the anniversary program, the show never mentions Ensor, except in its catalog, but its curators say the link is obvious: Sherman’s characters, created using elaborate makeup, masks and costumes, often turn absurd and disturbing.
“Ensor uses the masquerade to hide the real faces of people — but for him, the mask is actually showing the true face,” said Rein Deslé, one of the FoMu curators. “He’s trying to show the decadence that he sees all around him, and how he’s repulsed by what he sees. We saw all these parallels with Cindy Sherman, and we wanted to translate that imagery of Ensor into contemporary issues today.”
Ensor grew up in the seaside town of Ostend, Belgium, among the puppets and masks that his mother sold in her souvenir store. As the K.S.M.K.A. show reveals, Ensor relished in the popular entertainments of his era, like magic lantern shows and wild cabaret performances.
Once a year, the streets of Flemish towns like Ostend were flooded with revelers for the Carnival festival, parading in grotesque masks with bestial faces. From the beginning of his career, Ensor sketched live shows at cafes in Brussels where working-class performers used puppets to caricature the wealthy and powerful. Romy Cockx, a co-curator of the MoMu fashion exhibition, explained that those performances featured plenty of “zwanze” humor, a distinctly Belgian a form of ridicule that expresses resistance through jokes.
“From 1885 onward, he starts to use this theatrical staging in his works,” she said. “He moves away from purely realistic depictions and begins to incorporate fantasy.”
Masks began appearing a few years later, Todts said from the K.M.S.K.A.
“He discovered what a beautiful, efficient thing a mask can be if you don’t use it as an instrument to disguise, but as an instrument for démasquer,” said Todts, using a French word for unmasking, or exposure. “The moment that he recognized the possibilities, he thought, ‘This is my thing.’”
Ensor’s subsequent paintings of masquerades include his famous 1888 “Masks Mocking Death” (on loan to the K.S.M.K.A. from the Museum of Modern Art in New York) and his grotesque 1898 “The Great Judge.”
These were often understood satirically, as a critique of moneyed class’s mores, explained Elisa De Wyngaert, another MoMu co-curator. “He was a very critical observer of the world and of the bourgeoisie,” she said, adding that Ensor painted to show “their hypocrisy, their deceitful nature, their prejudice.”
The MoMu show includes Ensor paintings such as his 1890 “Old Lady with Masks” and “Fashionable Women,” from 1928, as well as displays showcasing the work of contemporary makeup artists who favor facial manipulation or mask-like looks. A recent example is Pat McGrath’s makeup design for Maison Margiela’s 2024 Spring/Summer collection, in which the models’ faces look like porcelain dolls.
As Todts pointed out, Ensor rarely painted the face behind his mask; the mask becomes the face, and the wearer disappears behind it.
This is true for many of the faces we see in MoMu’s fashion exhibition, and throughout the Cindy Sherman retrospective. After observing so many versions of Sherman portraying other people, one can’t help but wonder: What does she really look like? The answer never comes.
Ensor occasionally showed us his true likeness, sometimes as a face in a crowd, sometimes as Christ in a biblical scene. In his “Self-Portrait with Flowered Hat,” from 1883, he glares at us with utmost seriousness, but the foppish, plumed women’s hat on his head suggests either a challenge or a jest.
“Here he is playing with identity, maybe even with gender,” Todts said. “What could be more contemporary?”
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