Ostend Travel Guide

Mu.ZEE — short for Kunstmuseum aan Zee, 'Art Museum by the Sea' — is Belgium's leading museum of modern and contemporary art on the North Sea coast. Created in 2008 from the merger of two Ostend collections, it is housed in a protected modernist former department store designed by Gaston Eysselinck in 1947. The collection spans Belgian art from 1830 to the present, with particular strength in the coastal painters of Ostend: James Ensor, Constant Permeke and Léon Spilliaert are all represented in depth, and the museum also runs Ensor's preserved house nearby. Changing exhibitions and a rooftop terrace keep the seafaring city's art scene alive.