Carel Willink, Magic Realist visionary

An encounter with a book cover prompted me to reconsider an artist I've long admired but never written about: the brilliant Dutch visionary, Carel Willink.

[Carel Willink, Statue at Pleasure Chateau (1935), oil on canvas, © 2023, Estate of the artist]

Recently I received for review a recent edition of On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Jünger. On the cover is a painting by an artist I know relatively well, yet have barely written about. It prompted this article, which is about the Magic Realism of Carel Willink (1900-1983), which is due for wider appreciation in the anglophone world. I first encountered his art firsthand when I visited the Netherlands in May 2013, and saw his painting in the Stedelijk Museum, although I had been aware of his art before then. Willink appears in my “Lost in Amsterdam” article in The Jackdaw. My readers could be forgiven for not knowing Willink at all, despite his evident accomplishment and a degree of recognition during his long life. That recognition came within the Low Countries, France and Germany, although predominantly in his native Netherlands. In Great Britain, there are no works by him in public museums; in fact, there are none in museums outside of the Netherlands and Belgium. This is, I believe, the first substantial article written on Willink in English.

Albert Carel Willink, born in Amsterdam in 1900, briefly trained in architecture at the Technical University of Delft in 1918-9, before deciding to become a painter. He studied art in Berlin 1920-3, at a time when Grosz and Dix were making their mark on the art scene and when the Neue Sachlichkeit artists were emerging. However, Willink was more influenced by Expressionism, Futurism and Constructivism at this time. He exhibited with Modernist groups in Germany and in the Netherlands, when he returned to Amsterdam. Over 1926-30, Willink studied in Paris under the Cubist Le Fauconnier. He seemed wedded to Modernism and was attracted to abstraction. Léger, Lurçat and Le Corbusier (all artists with a prominent presence in the French art press at this time) exert an influence over Willink in the mid-1920s. By the late 1920s, Willink’s style – Neue Sachlichkeit, almost Precisionist in its handling – shows encounters with not only German art but art he had seen in Paris. Miró’s The Farm (1921-2) – either seen in person or in reproduction – gave Willink a connection to the art of the Surrealists. René Magritte was living in Paris at this time; we have no evidence that the artists met or that Willink saw paintings of Magritte in person, although he later came to admire his art.   

In 1931, following visits to Italy and encountering the art of Giorgio de Chirico, Willink began his development towards his mature style, which is a blend of Metaphysical, Magic Realism and Surrealism. The Netherlands never developed a group of Surrealists in the way it did in Brussels, Prague, London, Birmingham and elsewhere. The rise of classicism (the rappel à l’ordre) of the 1918-30s directed Dutch artists to draw inspiration from Dutch Golden Age painting, which had a greater hold on (figurative) artist’s imagination. With three strong movements – abstraction, classicism, Neue Sachlichkeit – in contention, Dutch artists seem to have felt no need to explore Surrealism, at least, not as the primary style.   

[Carel Willink, Portrait of Two Women (1937), oil on canvas, © 2023, Estate of the artist]

Late Visitors to Pompei (1931) situates suited male figures (more realist than Magrittean) in a ruined classical city under a smoking volcano. It anticipates Paul Delvaux’s treatment of the same subject by five years. Recalling visits to Neues Palais in Potsdam, near Berlin, Willink would paint many pictures with Neo-Classical statuary, stuccoed walls and formal gardens, often thrown into relief by wild and majestic landscape far distant from the more mild landscape of Brandenburg actuality. The statues of Neues Palais particularly drew the painter’s admiration.

We should compare Willink and Delvaux, for their art sometimes runs in parallel. Willink, as noted, actually began the fantastical paintings of classical ruins transposed to dramatic landscapes before Delvaux. I have not seen Willink’s name appearing in the Delvaux literature but Devaux definitely did know and admire Delvaux’s art; it is impossible that Delvaux did not know Willink’s. When that encounter took place, and how deeply Delvaux responded to Willink’s art, is unknown as yet. The two were born only a few years apart (Delvaux was born in 1897, in Belgium) and both had a passion for classical architecture, although Delvaux weakness in mathematics precluded him from even commencing training as an architect. In the art of both, relatively little “happens”, by way of action. We get scenes of stasis, meant to be viewed as timeless mises en scenes, prompting in the audience a wordless reverie rather than inductive inquiry or intellectual response. While Willink painted some nudes (mainly of wives or mistresses), he did not often combine the ruin views and nudes, perhaps realising that invidious comparisons would be raised between him and Delvaux. Willink goes far beyond Delvaux (and Magritte) in his hyperrealist technique, which sets him apart. Also, Willink’s specificity (regarding weather, light fall and architecture) separates him from the Surrealists. The poetic sensibility, yearning for the classical past, a proclivity for solitude and the aspiration to build a self-contained artistic world all link Willink and Delvaux.      

Willink is a Magic Realist because his scenes are improbable without being actually impossible. This differentiates Magic Realism from fantasy, Metaphysical art and Surrealism. It is plausibility and verisimilitude that make Willink different from Delvaux and Dalí, even if his art shares with them aspects of the astonishing, uncanny and unearthly beauty. Willink does not need to go any further than he did in order to achieve those qualities. One distinctive feature of Willink’s paintings is the depiction of heavy clouds while the foreground is sunlight. This introduces remarkable drama and invigorates what might otherwise be rather static and subdued images. The sudden inversion of the dark-earth-light-sky paradigm (that one also gets in snowscapes and nocturnes) gives Willink’s scene a unique character, often making them powerfully memorable. It cannot be stressed enough how important this aspect is for Willink, as he himself understood.

[Carel Willink, The Hunting Lodge (1935), oil on canvas, © 2023, Estate of the artist]

The best of Willink’s paintings fall within the realm of the almost likely, where a scene that is quite probable is invigorated by fortuitous cloud and lighting. It elicits in the viewer a desire to know this place and to inhabit it. We ask, “Does this place exist? Is an encounter with such a scene beyond us?” We experience melancholy of separation, tormented by the possibility that all that stands between ourselves and that place in reality is just two crucial pieces of information: whether the place exists and (if so) where it is. The poignancy of the beautiful place which is of a past time, that would never be built new in our age, has the plangency of forbidden experience. We know the thing past its prime and understand it anachronistically, somewhat distanced. Such beauty carries with it a charge of anguish.   

Willink’s portraits are fairly successful – certainly more so than Dalí’s commercial portraits of his American 1940-9 period. The combination of attractive and carefully painted surroundings in conjunction with a hyperrealist treatment of formal portraits gives these paintings a chilly congruity and consistency. We do feel that these characters belong in these spaces in a way we do not with Dalí’s socialite wives lost in a Californian-Catalonian desert plain. The paintings of exotic animals in incongruous settings are less successful. When they work well – the paintings with zebras – they are appealing but too often the paintings look forced or redundant. We fail to detect a logic – even a poetic logic – for the conjunction, and we are left with an odd-looking and odd-feeling painting, not in any powerfully uncanny sense, just as in a misfit or misfiring. Likewise, the paintings including new technology (spacecraft, robots, explosion clouds) work less often than those without. The Tate Gallery Moved (1976) has the London museum moved to a Mediterranean hilltop. All that is needed to suggest more incongruency are the tyre tracks in the loose dirt outside it.  

[Carel Willink, The Tate Gallery Moved (1976), oil on canvas, © 2023, Estate of the artist]

About Willink’s personal life, little needs to be written here. A series of relationships and marriages culminated in his marriage to his final partner, Sylvia, in 1977. His third wife destroyed a portrait of his second wife, producing a shocking manifestation of jealousy. One could hardly think of a more naked piece of psycho-drama; as part of a film, such an action would seem excessively obvious. There exists no more than a few catalogue entries and essays about Willink translated into English. It is time for a book in English on his art and solo exhibition in Great Britain so we might see his work firsthand and in depth.     

What might dissenting artists learn from Willink? To engage genuinely, with passion, with the classical past without acting as though the artist today inhabits that inheritance unbroken. The line is broken but one can think and work whilst considering the classical tradition and one’s own practice separated from that. That photographic sources can be treated in a way that is compatible with a feeling for classical art, though not in a seamless manner. The photograph-derived painting has a different quality to a painting by Van Eyck or Dürer; as long as he acknowledges this, the classically-minded artist may usefully employ that route in his own painting. What else? That effects of weather may be used daringly to enhance a scene and that understanding simple observations (i.e. about inverting dark-earth-light-sky paradigms) can invigorate art, even though these effects may not have been used by artists of the period one most admires. Finally, Willink’s visions suggest that making one’s own world is better than inhabiting the world of another artist or another age.    

The source for much of the information on Willink is his official website, administered by Sylvia Willink, his widow: https://carelwillink.info/index.html