Mu.Zee, as it’s known for short, was created to bring together two complementary Flemish art collections: the collection of mainly 19th-century works owned by the city of Ostend, previously housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, and the more modern collection owned by the Province of West Flanders. Mixed together, they provide an unmatched perspective on Flemish art from 1830 to the present day.

The museum is housed in a former department store at 11 Romestraat, which since the mid-1980s has been home to the Provincial Museum of Modern Art. It is an excellent setting, with Beaufort Inside currently residing on the ground floor, and the rest of the building given over to the permanent collection and temporary shows. The curious back rooms and mezzanine floors of the store mean that you get the feeling of discovering pockets of art, while the larger main floors provide ample space for bigger canvases and sculptures.

Pride of place goes to two Ostend artists, James Ensor (1860-1949) and Léon Spilliaert (1881-1946), both represented by broad cross-sections of work. Some of Spilliaert's best-known paintings are here, such as "Duizeling, of de tovertrap" from 1908, the theme of vertigo shown though a female figure perched precariously on a set of steps, her veil streaming in the night breeze. There are more of these night scenes and dark self portraits, for which Spilliaert is famous, but there are also less familiar, light-hearted caricatures and positively luminescent landscapes from later in his career.

With Ensor the accent is on his etchings, from street scenes and story illustrations to his notoriously vicious satirical pictures. But there are also well-known paintings, such as his self portrait wearing a woman's hat covered in flowers, and his impressionistic seascapes.

Uniting the two collections at Mu.Zee makes possible some fascinating artistic conversations between generations. In one particularly pleasing corner you can find Ensor’s small "Duivels die me sarren" from 1895, in which he shows himself beset by devils and demons, alongside "Bonjour Monsieur Ensor" by Felix Labisse from 1964, which shows the grandly bearded Ensor being accosted by two dandies on the seafront.

Beside that are two works by Xavier Tricot, another Ostend-born painter, "James Ensor (Erased)" from 1989 and "Ensors graf" from 1996, in which the phantom presence of the great artist is only just visible in the smears of black paint.

Although few other artists in Mu.Zee receive the attention given to Ensor and Spilliaert, the quality of the collection means that one or two works are usually enough to tell you why a painter or sculptor is worth attention and how to situate them in the history of Flemish and European art. This goes for highly individual artists, such as Fred Bervoets or Pjeroo Roobjee, and for those participating in broader artistic movements. There is a fascinating group of Flemish abstract paintings from the 1920s, for example, and a group of hyper-realists from the 1960s and ’70s (prepare to double-take at the sight of Jacques Verduyn's "Transistormeisje").

The collection is so broad that you are certain to meet unfamiliar artists – and to come away hungry for more. So, while there is a lack of big name Belgian surrealists (just one painting each from Paul Delvaux and René Magritte), there is a wonderfully distracting room of Marcel Mariën's playful assemblages, including a rock with a suitcase handle labelled "Sisyphus on Holiday" and a hand on a stick in Yves-Klein blue called a "Cultural Backscratcher".

The two Pol Mara canvases from 1962 made me want to see more of his Pop Art work incorporating fragments of photographic images, while lurking in an obscure back room I found the building's concrete frame giving new resonances to a collection of Gilbert Decock's geometric paintings from the 1960s and ’70s.

I was also inspired by Jean Brusselmans' stylised landscapes from the 1930s, with their squared-off clouds and radiant suns, and Frits Van Den Berghe's expressionist 1920s bar scenes, in which a cautious man tries to pass a group of large, drunk, naked women on the stairs. A situation familiar to many Flemish drinkers, of course.

Beaufort Inside

You've seen art in your swimsuit at Beaufort03, now go inside to see artists in their swimsuits. Some of the most interesting items in Artists on the Belgian Coast, 1830-1958 are those that reveal famous painters off-guard, just hanging out at the seaside like the rest of us.

Some of these lived on the coast, while others visited to work or relax. There are quirky photos of René Magritte reclining in the dunes with a small pet dog and the usually dour expressionist Constant Permeke paddling happily in the sea. George Grard and friends play darts outside his studio, an idyllic setting near Sint-Idesbald also painted by Paul Delvaux.

As you might expect, there are plenty of seascapes among the paintings and a fascination for the people who worked on the coast. Sometimes this is romantic, as in Theodore Verstraete's large canvases of fishermen setting off for their boats, sometimes it is closer to anthropology, with several artists painting or sculpting the gnarled heads of elderly working men and women.

The exhibition is good at extending these lines of thought to other sources, such as showing a late 19th-century report about life on the coast, which illustrates comments about drunkenness with a sketch of a mother and daughter carrying the head of the family home after a mid-morning session. A similar exploration reaches into turn-of-the-century tourist posters, contrasting clogs and headscarves with fashionable Parisian bathing dresses. (There is even a strong suggestion that holiday-makers might look forward to romantic entanglements among the dunes.)

There are two highlights in this diverting show. The first are paintings by Floris Jespers, who presents a remarkable fragmented view of the seafront in "Bonjour Ostende" and "Strand te Oostende" from 1926-27. The sharp lines of fashionable women's hats slice across the scene, while detached male heads float around at calf level, moustaches bristling.

The other is Permeke's wood carving of his own head from 1940, resembling nothing so much as a weathered mooring post, next to the sleek, enigmatic sculpture of his daughter, made by Floris' brother Oscar Jespers in 1926. Two styles, using very different materials, yet together evoking an artistic life on coast rich in creativity, friendship and family ties.

Kunstmuseum aan Zee

Romestraat 11, Ostend

www.kunstmuseumaanzee.be