Meet the artist who turned his family's mask shop into a house of surreal horrors

James Ensor (1860–1949) spent nearly his entire life in Ostend, Belgium, living above the family shop that sold carnival masks. In the 1880s he turned his back on the realist style that had first brought him recognition and began conjuring a far stranger world: grotesque Christian icons, leering masks, and savage social satire, all rendered with a loose, scratchy line that makes the horrific feel oddly playful. — Read the rest
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