George Tooker

George Tooker, Self-Portrait, 1947

George Tooker was born August 5, 1920, in Brooklyn, New York. He was the first child of a Cuban-American mother and a father who was a bond broker. The trajectory of his life began to manifest itself from the age of seven, when he began taking painting lessons from Malcolm Fraser, a family friend whose oeuvre was in the Barbizon tradition. Tooker began high school in Bellport, Long Island; however, his parents weren't much impressed with the quality of the school, and he spent his last two years at the more rigorously academic Phillips Academy, in Andover, north of Boston. He developed an intense dislike of the straight-laced school, with its orientation toward business and finance, and its concern that its students learn to hide their emotions. Tooker gravited instead toward the school's art studio, where he worked at landscape drawing and watercolors. By virtue of its location, Andover did furnish some additional, if unintended education: Tooker became aware of effects of the Depression on the mill towns north of Andover. He was angered by the sharp contrast between the comfortable lifestyle of the children of the economic elite who attended the academy, and the many unemployed.

George Tooker, The Artist’s Daughter, 1955

After graduation from Phillips in 1938, Tooker went on to Harvard, where he majored in English literature, that having been the only academic subject of interest to him at Phillips. Yet he spent much of his time at the Fogg Art Museum, and in the towns surrounding Boston, where he made watercolor sketches of the urban and rural landscapes. He also took up with some radical political organizations. It was during this time that he first became interested in the potential of art as a tool for social justice. Especially inspirational was the work of Mexican painters like David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco.

George Tooker, Coney Island, 1947

Graduating from Harvard in 1942, Tooker decided to pursue his long-standing desire to study art. Securing his parent's support, he enrolled in the Art Students League in New York. Here he studied for two years with Reginald Marsh, Kenneth Hayes Miller (who also taught Edward Hopper), and Harry Sternberg. From the standpoint of influence, it cannot be entirely coincidental that all three of these artists were men of social conscience who expressed their concerns in their work.

George Tooker, Bathers, 1950

In 1944 Tooker met the painter Paul Cadmus. Cadmus was a painter who worked with egg tempera (using traditional Reanissance techniques), and transmitted this expertise to Tooker, whose use of this medium marks his mature style. A year later he moved to a flat on Bleecker Street in Greewich Village, New York. In 1949 Cadmus and Tooker spent six months travelling in Italy and France. In the same year Tooker met painter William Christopher, who was to become his life partner until Christopher's death in 1973.

George Tooker, The Waiting Room, 1959

In 1950 Tooker and Christopher moved into an illegal loft located at W. 18th St. Here, in order to support themselves, they made custom furniture. However, Tooker was beginning to earn both recognition and income from his art: the Whitney Museum bought his best-known painting, The Subway, that year. With greater means as their disposal, the two first bought and renovated a brownstone on State Street in Brooklyn Heights (1953), and then, in the late 50s, he and Christopher built a weekend home near Hartland, Vermont.

George Tooker, Subway, 1950

During the 1950s, Tooker painted some of the 20th century's most memorable images of modern angst. In Cornice, a young man on a high building ledge apparently contemplates escaping life's complexities for good. With its lost souls haunting the New York underground Subway (above) envisions modernity as a spiritual prison system. The Kafkaesque Government Bureau (below) pictures an office of seemingly infinite extent, where people wait like penitents at the windows of terminally unresponsive bureaucrats.

George Tooker, Government Bureau, 1956

In the wonderfully weird Highway (below), a man dressed entirely in black except for the red jewels dotting his belt holds up a gloved hand like a traffic cop to halt three strangely bulbous cars. In his other hand he wields a circular red reflector on a pole, hiding his face from our view. A set of white arrows on posts point straight downward, directing our thoughts, maybe, to the underground energies of the unconscious. 

George Tooker, Highway, 1953

The one-man shows in New York galleries picked up speed, taking place in 1960, '62, '64, and '67. Then it was time to give something back: he return to the Art Students League to teach himself from 1965 to 1968. However, at the end of this period, Christopher's health was beginning to deteriorate to such an extent that Vermont winters were too severe for him. They began a search for a home in Europe where they could winter over, and ultimately found an apartment in Malaga, Spain. Christopher died in Spain in 1973, and Tooker spent most of 1974 there, wrapping up disposition of his estate. Also in '73, a major survey exhibition of Tooker's work was organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. That exhibition traveled to Chicago, New York, and Indianapolis. Tooker still lives and works in Harland, Vermont.

George Tooker, Ward, 1970

Why Tooker never achieved the status of, let's say. Jackson Pollock is a puzzling problem. The obvious answer is that he was crowded away from the center stage of the New York art world by the sweeping success, critical and commercial, of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950′s and early 1960′s. Abstract Expressionism was extolled by Nelson Rockefeller as “free enterprise painting.” As the United States confronted the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom and other American cultural organizations promoted AbEx and jazz music to combat the Soviet’s Socialist Realism schools of art and literature. Some writers like Frances Stonor Saunders, in her book Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War, contend that the CIA actually sponsored exhibitions of AbEx art in Europe.

Leap Before You Look

George Tooker, Cornice, 1949

 Leap Before You Look
by W.H. Auden

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear;
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.

Willi Baumeister

Oskar Schlemmer (left) and Willi Baumeister, Frankfurt 1929

Willi Baumeister (1889-1955) was born in Stuttgart, Germany. His father was a chimney-sweeper; his mother was the artistically talented daughter of a decorative painter. From her family Willi received his first artistic impulses. Already as a child his most prized toys were paper and pencil. Around age 16 he decided to study at the art academy but at his father's request first trained as a decorative painter from 1905 to 1907. Already during this apprenticeship he was admitted to the Königliche Akademie (Royal Academy Stuttgart). There he met Oskar Schlemmer with whom he cultivated a lifelong friendship.

 

Willi Baumeister, Self-Portrait in the Studio, 1911

In 1912, Baumeister studied for three months at the Cercle International des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After his return he moved into his first studio in Stuttgart. The next year he participated for the first time in an exhibition at the Gallery Der Sturm in Berlin, and in 1914 produced four wall pictures for the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition. From November 1914 to December 1918 Baumeister served in the First World War, which took him to the Balkan, Ukraine, and the Caucasus. Nonetheless, he also participated in exhibitions during the war years. In 1915 he met Oskar Kokoschka and the architect Adolf Loos in Vienna.

  Willi Baumeister, Readers under the Lamp, 1913

After the end of the war Baumeister resumed his studies at the Stuttgart Art Academy and completed them in 1922. In 1919, Baumeister joined the radical Artist Association Novembergruppe. At this time he began sketching stage and costume designs for performances at Stuttgart theaters and also turned to commercial graphics. Contacts in France - especially with Fernand Léger, with whom he exhibited in Berlin in 1922, and with Le Corbusier - made him known beyond German borders.

 Willi Baumeister, Female Runner II, 1925

In 1923, Baumeister met the artist Margarete Oehm whom he married in 1926. In 1924, his work was shown at a large exhibition of modern German art in Leningrad and Moscow. In 1926, he participated in an exhibition in New York and again traveled to Paris, which led to a large exhibition at the Galérie d'Art Contemporain in 1927. In addition, he produced the stage design for Händel's opera Ariodante for the Landestheater Stuttgart. Baumeister was also well received in 1927 at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung (Great Berlin Art Exhibition) where he met Kasimir Malewitsch.

 

Willi Baumeister, Tennisspieler liegend, 1929

As a convinced representative of applied art, Baumeister joined the ring neue werbegestalter (circle of new commercial designers) in 1927 whose members included Kurt Schwitters and other famous German typographers. But the most important event for him - as for the entire European avant-garde - was the large 1927 Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart with the famous Weissenhofsiedlung (Weissenhof Housing Settlement). Here, he not only designed numerous printed materials, but also furnished a number of rooms with his works. Through these activities Baumeister was called to the Municipal Applied Arts School (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main, where he had a professorship from 1928 to 1933. Initially hired as a lecturer for commercial graphics and typography he certainly would have welcomed taking on the painting class as well. This, however, was taught by Max Beckmann.

Willi Baumeister, Rope-Jumper, 1928

In 1930, Baumeister received the Württemberg State Prize for the painting Linienfigur (Line Figure). His December 1932 exhibition at Galerie Cassirer in Berlin would be his last exhibition in Germany until 1945. At the beginning of 1933 Hitler came into power, and he received notice without further explanation that his future teaching activity would be terminated. Following the dismissal, Baumeister returned to Stuttgart where he initially earned his living mainly with commercial graphics. Even though he was not subject to a work prohibition, public activity as an artist would be unthinkable. The situation right now has no prospects for us but I am solidly convinced that we will be needed one day and not the shallow canvas-knackers who bow to the authoritative opinion of the whole rabble, Baumeister wrote in a 1934 letter.

Willi Baumeister, Swimmers on the Ladder, 1929

In 1936, Willi Baumeister met the owner of the Wuppertal lacquer Factory, Dr. Kurt Herberts, and took a job at his company. There he worked alongside with other artists defamed by the National Socialist regime: Franz Krause, Alfred Lörcher, Georg Muche, and Oskar Schlemmer as well as art historian Hans Hildebrandt. In Herberts' firm it was necessary to research ancient and modern painting techniques. Between 1933 and 1944 five publications grew out of these investigations, which were published under Dr. Kurt Herberts's name - including 10,000 Years of Painting and its Materials. From 1943 to 1944 Baumeister wrote his manuscript Das Unbekannte in der Kunst (The Unknown in Art), which was first published in 1947.

Willi Baumeister, Painter with Palette, 1933

In 1937, Baumeister participated in a show of constructivist art in Basel. The same year, four of his pictures were displayed at the notorious Munich exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art). Concurrent to this Nazi propaganda show, he exhibited under the title Unabhängige Kunst (Independent Art) in Paris where he met his friends Fernand Léger and Le Corbusier. In 1938, Baumeister deposited a large number of pictures in the Kunsthalle Basel (to keep them out of reach from the National Socialists), and participated in the London exile exhibition Twentieth Century German Art.

   

Willi Baumeister, Book Cover: Modulation and Patina, 1944

In June of 1940, Paul Klee, whom Baumeister had greatly admired and whose art had strongly inspired him to the end, died. In 1941, Baumeister was prohibited to paint and exhibit. "It isn't easy to withstand the depressions of this time. This for seven years now. Presumably I can no longer show my pictures in exhibitions. I thus work exclusively for myself alone.", he wrote in his diary. Then, in April 1943, the death of Oskar Schlemmer hit him very hard: "While the bombs fell and the gunfire roared, I still especially remembered the late friend." (Diary).

Willi Baumeister, Chumbaba, 1954

In 1943 - the factory in Wuppertal and Baumeister's Stuttgart house were partially destroyed by bombs - he moved with his family to Urach in the Swabian Alp. In April 1945 he fled with his wife and daughters to the house of artist-friend Max Ackermann on Lake Constance to evade obligatory service in the Volkssturm (People's Storm) and a possible court martial. Already a few weeks after the war's end, Baumeister was engaged as director and teacher at the Stuttgart Art Academy. His reputation grew steadily. He exhibited throughout Europe, wrote numerous articles, taught, and participated on art juries.

Willi Baumeister with his daughters Felicitas and Krista, Stuttgart 1955

In 1950, the first so-called Darmstadt Dialogue took place. Baumeister participated in a discussion titled The Human Image of Our Time, along with well-known art historians such as Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub and Hans Sedlmayr, psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, and philosopher Theodor Adorno. In 1954 Baumeister withdrew in protest from the German Artist Union, after belonging to its executive board since its new founding in 1950. Baumeister found that in an interview on non-representational painting, Karl Hofer had expressed a disparaging view. This was preceded by a polemic public debate between Hofer and art critic (and Baumeister biographer) Will Grohmann, a vehement advocate and promoter of abstract art.

Willi Baumeister, Deutscher Künstler Bund, Exhibition Poster, 1951

On August 31, 1955 Willi Baumeister died while at work on a painting. His death came unexpectedly - he was found sitting at the easel. You should visit his excellent official website.

Rafal Malczewski

Rafal Malczewski, Auto na tle pejzażu zimowego, 1930

 

Rafal Malczewski (1892-1965) was born in Kraków, Poland, as son of the famous painter Jacek Malczewski and his wife Mary Gralewski. After graduating from high school in Kraków, Malczewski studied philosophy, architecture, and agronomy in Vienna between 1910 and 1915. His father, then  a professor at Kraków's Academy of Fine Arts, introduced him to painting. Between 1917 and 1939 Malczewski lived in Zakopane, where he was a member of the artistic and intellectual elite concentrated around the painter Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and composer Karol Szymanowski. He was a keen mountaineer and a great skier. In 1917, while climbing in the Tatra mountains, his companion was killed, and Malczewski spent all night tied to the hook waiting for rescue assistance. 

Rafal Malczewski, Jesién, 1926

Malczewski joined the Podhale Arts Society, which promoted the idea of seeking out foundations for Polish art in the local folk culture. He designed productions for the Formist Theatre which began operating in Zakopane in 1925, creating scenery for the plays of Witkiewicz and Strindberg. Malczewski first exhibited his works in public in 1924 in Warsaw. Other exhibitions followed in many Polish cities. During the interwar period Malczewski gained considerable fame as a painter, presenting his work at the Biennale in Venice in 1932, in Berlin, Helsinki, Los Angeles, Moscow, and New York. He won a gold medal for his painting Spring in the Mountains (below) at the World Exhibition of Art and Technology in Paris in 1937.  

 Rafal Malczewski, Spring in the Mountains, 1937

Landscapes dominate Malczewski's oeuvre. His early works were influenced by the Symbolist art of his father. In the second half of the 1920s he was inspired by Cubism and Futurism. His landscapes primarily depicted the Tatra Mountains and the surrounding hills of the Podhale region. Frequent subjects included sleepy towns and empty landscapes, which often were supplemented with the technical achievements of contemporary civilization. Malczewski painted sparsely populated train stations, telegraph lines, and railroad tracks in numerous variations. Clouds, snow-covered peaks, fields, streams, and the crystal clarity of the atmosphere give his paintings a metaphysical dimension.

Rafal Malczewski, Kamieniolom, 1927

Between 1927 and 1929 Malczewski created a series of paintings depicting the landscapes of Yugoslavia and the French Riviera. In 1934 and 1935 he resided in Upper Silesia and recorded his impressions of this area in a series of dark, gloomy landscapes that reflect the industrial character of Black Silesia. These contrast starkly with his sun-saturated, green-glowing hilly landscapes of the Beskid Mountains. In his images of Silesia Malczewski depicted steel mills, mines and coal hills - nature being destroyed by industry. The realistic observation and emotional charge inherent in these works brings them very close to the German "New Objectivity" movement.

Rafal Malczewski, Pejzaż górski, 1928 

In 1939, after the outbreak of World War II and the German occupation of Poland, Malczewski fled to Paris. One year later, he went to Brazil, where he spent almost two years creating watercolor views of Rio de Janeiro and Curitiba, and landscape paintings of Parana. Malczewski then moved on to the United States, where he lived in New York among other places. Finally, in 1942, he settled in Montreal, traveling extensively in Canada and the United States in search of subjects to paint. 

Rafal Malczewski, Pejzaż przedwiosenny (Snop światla), 1926

 

The Canadian National Railways and the Pacific National Railways commissioned Malczewski to create a series of watercolors advertising the companies. In December 1942, he had his first Canadian exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Art. In 1944, he exhibited in Washington's prestigious Corcoran Gallery. Only in 1959 Malczewski visited Poland again. A stroke suffered in 1957 resulted in partial paralysis, forcing him to give up painting. Rafal Malczewski died at a hospital in Montreal in 1965.

Clovis Trouille - An Angel of Bad Taste

Il est vrai que je n'ai jamais travaillé en vue d'obtenir un grand prix à une biennale de Venise quelconque, mais bien plutôt pour mériter 10 ans de prison. (Clovis Trouille)

Clovis Trouille, Religieuse italienne fumant la cigarette, 1944

Camille Clovis Trouille (1889-1975) was born in La Fère, in the Picardie region of France. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts of Amiens from 1905 to 1910. With a name worthy of a pseudonym (to have "la trouille" means to be afraid in French), Trouille paddled upstream in a river of Christian morality, military patriotism and bourgeois ostentation with lightness, irony and obstinacy. His erotic and gaudy work delivered a slap in the face to both religion and war (Trouille considered war to be an "infamy", one which had permanently traumatised him). He was drafted on 2 August, 1914. The First World War made him an anarchist and his painting followed suit.

Clovis Trouille, Remembrance, c. 1930

One of his first paintings, Remembrance (above), features two dead soldiers, one German the other French. In their hands they hold two white rabbits and two wooden crosses. On the battlefield a white-haired cardinal cloaked in red with a robe and garter belt bestows his blessing upon a military commander. A nude woman, her body contorted, wears a red, white and blue garter and leaves a trail of military medals behind her.

Clovis Trouille, La profanation, la belle torchie, c. 1945

Remembrance was discovered in 1930 by Dali and Aragon at the Salon des peintres et écrivains révolutionnaires. Trouille also was much appreciated by André Breton, who considered him "the grand master of anything goes", and offered to exhibit his works in his gallery. Trouille refused for fear of being permanently under a label, and it was not until 1962 that he had his first solo exhibition. It was followed the next year with a solo show at the Raymond Cordier gallery in Paris, which was forbidden to anyone aged under age 18 and over 70. In La voyeuse, the dark room is forbidden for anyone under fifty:

Clovis Trouille, La voyeuse, 1960

Was Trouille a surrealist? "Anarchist, surrealist - I don't know. I paint what I love, I paint feminine beauty. For me everything is erotic. It is the most wonderful feeling" explained Trouille. A nonconformist, he peeled away the layers and revealed the defects of the right-wing western society of the time. For example, Bikini (below) depicts a French colony. In the distance in the middle of a field of wheat there is a French soldier leading a group of spahis soldiers.

Clovis Trouille, Bikini, 1930s

On the side of the road a priest with his head in his hands contemplates a skull and crossbones. Barely hidden behind a few stalks of wheat three white women sunbathe in bikinis. The hypocrisy of their mission to "civilize" is thereby unmasked. The Romance of a Spahi (1881) was Pierre Loti's second novel, dealing with a Spahi (French colonial soldiers famous for their romantic uniforms), stationed in sub-Sahara Senegal. The novel was daring for its time as it depicts a love affair between a black woman and white man.

Clovis Trouille, Dialogue au Carmel, 1944

In The Red Poet (below) we see a guillotine before the "prison for nonconformist poets" and a poet with a black cape like the anarchists of the early twentieth century. Hiding behind an urinal, he prepares to attack the executioner. The red poet is André Breton. In the foreground, a phallus-shaped monument is erected in honor of de Sade, topped by a bust of Pope Pius XII.

Clovis Trouille, The Red Poet, 1949

My favorite Trouille painting, The Confession, reminds me at Rivarol's brilliant observation: Il y a des péchés si flatteurs que, si je les confessais, j'en commettrais un autre d'orgueil (There are sins so flattering that, if I confessed them, I would commit another one of pride):

Clovis Trouille, The Confession, n.d.

Towards the end of his life, Clovis Trouille experienced a certain success with his painting Oh! Calcutta! Calcutta! (below) which gave its title to the famous comedy musical that had sex as the main topic. Created in Broadway in 1969 by Kenneth Tynan, it starred Samuel Beckett as one of its librettists and John Lennon among its musicians. In Oh! Calcutta! Calcutta! (The French phrase "oh quel cul t'as" translates roughly as "oh what a lovely backside you have"), "the ass  forms a perfect circle designed to suggest the conquest of the moon", Trouille explained.

Clovis Trouille, Oh! Calcutta! Calcutta!, c. 1960

Some of Trouille's pieces are reminiscent of English Pop Art. In Souvenir without Suite (below) a female face straight out of a 1950s ad campaign stares out at the spectators revealing three very yellow bananas. In the background three nuns with covered faces piously read the bible.

Clovis Trouille, Souvenir without Suite, c. 1960

In The Kiss of the Confessor a couple languishingly embraces inside the cathedral of Amiens. She with lipstick red as blood, mascara and a beauty mark at the corner of her mouth. He with shoulder length hair, red lips, a look of love in his eyes as he leans over her, his hand on her breast. Their bodies intertwine below the stained-glass gazes of kings. A nun and a priest stand out against a somber background.

Clovis Trouille, The Kiss of the Confessor, n.d.

Trouille always wanted to stay independent. He never wanted to depend on galleries. Almost all of his life, he worked as a restorer and decorator of department store mannequins in Paris. He only painted in his spare time. His work consists of only a hundred paintings which he reworked, sometimes for years. Trouille would probably be surprised to see that his paintings are currently trading between 250.000 and 300.000 Euros.

 

Clovis Trouille, My Funeral, 1940

Fascinated or amused by his own mortality Trouille painted a triptych of paintings entitled: My Funeral, (above), My Burial, (1945) and My Grave (below). My Funeral displays a magnificent carriage passing through the streets of Paris followed by a parade of bishops, soldiers and dogs.

Clovis Trouille, My Grave, 1947

In My Grave ghostly women lurk around the cemetery wearing bats as loin cloths, on the gravestone we can read "Here lies the artist who lost his life while earning it". At the top of the vault the face of Jesus Christ appears. Clovis Trouille laughed to the very end. He died on 24 September 1975 in Paris. You can see more of Trouille's work here.

Carel Willink

 Carel Willink in 1977

Carel Willink (1900-1981) was born in Amsterdam, the eldest of two sons of Jan Willink and Wilhelmina Altes. His father was - in those days very rare - a professional car dealer and also an amateur painter. He encouraged his son to start painting and Carel made his first painting when he was 14 years. He attended high school, studied medicine from 1918-1919, and then civil engineering at the Technical University of Delft. But he soon moved to the Hague, where he decided in 1919 that he wanted to be a painter.

Carel Willink, Self-Portrait, 1944

Because modern art experienced its heyday in Germany, Willink decided to study at the Academy in Düsseldorf. There he was rejected after several weeks, and he continued at the Staatliche Hochschule in Berlin. Eventually he studied three years at at Hans Baluschek's painting school, starting out with expressionist works. During his studies Willink experimented with various art movements. At first he felt strongly drawn to Vincent van Gogh, and made a number of landscape paintings in a similar style. Soon he became impressed by the Expressionism of George Grosz and Otto Dix. Later he made collages in the style of Kurt Schwitters. Upon his graduation, he became influenced by the work of Wassily Kandinsky and constructivism, and produced a number of abstract paintings and watercolors. In 1923 he exhibited with the November Group at the Moabit Glaspalast.

Carel Willink, Portrait of a Lady, c. 1930

Upon his return to Amsterdam in 1924, Willink began to experiment with Cubism and Futurism and became a member of the avant-garde art group The Triangle. Through this group he came in contact with the writer Edgar du Perron. He was a key advisor and good friend of Willink until his death in May 1940. Willink then developed a distinctive style of painting: a kind of cubism with strong figurative elements related to the work of Fernand Leger. Examples of this style were the paintings Three Women, The Silver Wedding and The Clock. Willink, through these works, developed into a reasonably successful artist.

Carel Willink, Townscape, 1934

In 1926, during a study trip to Paris, Willink came into contact with the neoclassicism of Pablo Picasso and his figurative paintings, often with classical subjects but with a slightly cubist character. During this period he made works such as Pigeons, and Girl with Dove. The same year, he married Mies van der Meulen, but she left him in two years later. In 1931 he painted Venus Resting, with Wilma Jeuken as the model. They married in 1934 and moved to Amsterdam, where Willink lived until his death.

Carel Willink, Self-Portrait with Wilma van der Meulen, 1934

On the advice of his friend Du Perron, Willink began to paint realistic in the early 1930s. During these years, he was concerned about the future: the stock market crash, the Depression, and the rise of  Fascism and Nazism. He was tired of the unending series of experiments in painting, and decided to return to traditional painting techniques. Thus, he developed his timeless style of Magic Realism, set in a threatening and oppressive atmosphere.

Carel Willink, The Execution, 1933

During a tour of Italy in 1931, Willink became fascinated by classical sculptures and Renaissance architecture. Both elements appear frequently in his work. He also became acquainted with the work of Giorgio de Chirico whose love of emptiness, depth, and extreme shadows would also influence his work. On his return from Italy Willink began working on two paintings: Late Visitors to Pompeii and Uproar, both of which are typical for his later work.

 

Carel Willink, The Blimp, 1933

 

During the German occupation of the Netherlands, it became hard for Willink to sell paintings, all the more so since he refused to sell paintings to German buyers. In order to meet his financial needs, he now began to make portraits. These photo realistic portraits perfectly fit into his own magical realist style. Willink was until his death the most famous, most popular and most expensive portrait painter in the Netherlands. In 1944, Willink painted the following portrait of J. Bergmans, and many portrait commissions would follow over the years:

Carel Willink, J. Bergmans, 1944

In 1947, Willink stayed in Paris and, in 1951, he exhibitied at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Although his technique remained unchanged after the war, Willink experimented with new subjects. Between 1950 and 1965 he made a series of paintings of mostly exotic animals which he incorporated in unusual environments. A giraffe or a rhinoceros in a sculpture garden creates a strange effect. He also combined a nuclear power plant, an atomic explosion or a demolition machine with ruined temples and weathered statues. In 1961, he made a study trip to the Italian Bomarzo Gardens. The bizarre, monstrous statues, designed by Pirro Ligorio, returned a few times in his work.

Carel Willink, Sylvia Quiël, c. 1975

In 1969, Willink married Mathilda de Doelder, who was an eccentric society figure and had lived with him since 1963. In 1975, Willink started an affair with the sculptress Sylvia Quiël (above). After Mathilde had damaged the portrait he had done of Wilma Jeuken in 1952 they separated, and Willink started living together with Quiël until his death in 1981. On May 19, 1977 Mathilde said on television that she would commit suicide if the separation wouldn't be settled in a a way that would be acceptable to her. When it became formal she received 135.000 guilders and started her own gallery in Amsterdam. She also started an affair with coke dealer Gerard Vittali, who found her death on her bed on October 25, 1977. She was naked, had a gun in her hand and a bullet in her head. It was unclear if she had been killed or had committed suicide.  

 

Carel Willink, Jobstijding, 1952

In the 1970s another change in Willink's took place: The strange light traps and menacing dark clouds gave way to bright daylight, a blue sky and white clouds. Paintings like Dryad Resting and Portrait of Rik testified to a newly found hope for the future. The year 1980 saw a major exhibition of his works in the Stedelijk Museum in honor of his eightieth anniversary. Willink felt only now recognized as a serious painter. He died in 1983 shortly after the publication of his authorized biography Willink Truth. He is buried in Zorgvlied. The tomb was designed by his widow, Sylvia Willink Quiël.