🖼️ The False Self, Wearing Masks, and Being Who You Are

The Wisdom of Art (Vol. 12)

Sep 29, 2023

∙ Paid

Greetings Readers!

Here is the next volume of our series — The Wisdom of Art. This series invites us to pause from our busy lives to explore the wisdom of art and poetry.

Here is a painting, a poem, and a bit of prose…

Masks Looking at a Tortoise by James Ensor (1894)

1. Masks Looking at a Tortoise (Painting)

James Ensor (1860 – 1949) was a Belgian painter and printmaker who significantly influenced expressionism and surrealism and lived in Ostend for almost his entire life. When Ensor’s works were rejected by the Brussels Salon in 1883, he joined a group of progressive artists called Les Vingt. During this period, in such works as his Scandalized Masks (1883), he began to depict images of grotesque fantasy—skeletons, phantoms, and hideous masks. Ensor’s interest in masks probably began in his mother’s curio shop. His Entry of Christ into Brussels (1888), filled with carnival masks painted in smeared, garish colors, provoked such indignation that he was expelled from Les Vingt.