Carel Willink Week at The Jade Sphinx: Chateau en Espagne

The charming French phrase bâtir des châteaux en Espagne literally means to build castles in Spain, but a closer translation would be to build castles in the sky.  In short, it means to dream something clearly impossible, as is amply demonstrated by Willink’s picture.

This dreamscape illustrates the notions of impossible castles in the sky to moody effect.  As I said earlier with some of Willink’s pictures, while it is not exactly to my taste, the virtuosity on display is without question.

Surely few people of his generation mastered light with such facility.  As with the two earlier pictures, Willink bathes part of his landscape in light, other parts in shadow.  Notice how the parts of the chateau in the background that are illuminated by the sun pop out thanks to the use of shadows along the side.  Willink also uses light to show that the chateau is all façade with no interior – in fact, the crumbled wall facing the viewer could only be part of a ruin. 

Light creeps through the rail columns, leaving shadows at the base of the statue of the Apollo Belvedere.  The base is illuminated, but the statue itself (a great masterpiece now on hand at the Vatican), is shrouded by darkness.

That Willink chooses the Apollo Belvedere is, in itself, of great interest.  It was first discovered circa 1489, and quickly became lionized as a great masterpiece of the Classical world.  The statue’s reputation waxed and waned over the years, and today it is considered one of the great touchstones of classic homoerotic art.  (A judgment that baffles your correspondent, but that’s another story.)  In 1969 the great art critic and historian Sir Kenneth Clark (1903-1983) wrote: for four hundred years after it was discovered the Apollo was the most admired piece of sculpture in the world.  It was Napoleon’s greatest boast to have looted it from the Vatican.  Now it is completely forgotten except by the guides of coach parties, who have become the only surviving transmitters of traditional culture.

The landscape seems to play upon one of the great themes in Willink’s work – that of separation.  We noted in two earlier pictures that figures and individuals in Willink’s cluttered world view were often denied the solace of connection.  Here, the chateau and Apollo are divided by a chasm that owes more than a little to Renaissance portraiture.  As with most of these Post Modern games, one gets the impression that Willink is trying to say something, but one is never sure what.

The sky is wonderfully effective and the dramatic import and again fills the viewer with a melodramatic sense of expectation. 

There sure is much to admire in this work – as with most of the Willink corpus – I just wish his vision made a little more sense.

Carel Willink Week at The Jade Sphinx: The Blimp (1933)

Well … wow, what a picture.

First, let’s look at what artist Carel Willink is doing on the lower half of the canvas.  He streaks the ground with both rain puddles and shadows.  These actively work to separate the human figures from the world around them, by accentuating the distances between them and creating shadows that clearly demark distance.  In addition, the houses are largely bathed in shadow; the house on the left seems to stare at the people in the street with a particularly sinister cycloptian eye.

The two (significantly) dead trees point upwards to the sky and the airship.  Clearly the dirigible is the focus of attention, but here Willink again plays his games of mood and atmosphere: the sky, though bright, is still overcast.  The men in the street may be greeting the blimp, but Willink clearly sees this technology as a mixed blessing.

That this is the case is not at all surprising: airships wreaked havoc in Europe during the Great War, creating more effective aerial bombardments than the primitive planes of the time.  For Willink (1900 – 1983), who came to his maturity during the Great War, the 1930s enthusiasm for airships must have been met with mistrust at best and downright hostility at worst.  The brand-new notion of terror from the skies is one that would’ve made its mark.

Let’s look at some other things in the picture – first, notice that the third-floor windows of the house on the left have human-shaped columns.  (Rather artful columns, at that.)  The houses were built to an older, more human scale – part of a recognizable European tradition.  The hulking airship looms over this landscape, its scale larger, its design clearly modern. 

Also interesting – any passers-by in front of one of the homes could tip his hat and be recognized, and see who was within.  There is no such potential human interaction with the airship; it is completely indifferent to the people waving below.

The rain, too, is symbolic of both a passing storm, and of new beginnings. Though ponderous, the airship is moving, while the people below are not.  One cannot help but think that Willink thought that technology was moving forward, regardless of its impact on human beings and the changes it would bring. 

There is about Willink’s pictures a feeling that all of its component parts are made of different paintings.  Look at the buildings, the dirigible, the people – they are all made with very hard lines that separate each component from every other component.  It is this sense of isolation in a crowded world that is, to my eye, the most interesting and individual characteristic of Willink’s work.  At times, it seems as if he presents a world of wonders that is completely incapable of supporting a human connection.

Carel Willink Week at The Jade Sphinx: A View of the Town (1934)

I have only recently become aware of the art of Albert Carel Willink (1900 – 1983), a Dutch artist who worked in a style that he called imaginary realism.  Not all of it is to my taste, to be sure, as it has a decidedly surrealist bent.  However, the imagery is interesting and his technique remarkable.

Willink was born in Amsterdam; his father was an amateur artist who indulged his son’s artistic interests.  The younger Willink at first thought he would make a career in medicine, but in 1918-19 Willink went to the Technische Hogeschool in Delft to study architecture.  He then moved on to Germany, where he tried to get an academic training in a Düsseldorf atelier, but was not admitted.  Later he studied for a short time at the Staatliche Hochschule in Berlin.

It is a tragedy that a painter of Willink’s talent was imprisoned by his particular historical moment.  For artists like Damien Hirst or Andy Warhol, it’s irrelevant that they are talentless, as Modernist expectations are naturally low.  But for a man like Willink who could really paint, it’s depressing to watch him waste his talent on such shallow gamesmanship.

Willink initially marked time with expressionist and abstract painting, but by the mid-1920s he created his own style, imaginary realism.  The best way of thinking about Willink is that he was an artist who could really paint intent on making some of the most inventive dreamscapes of the Twentieth Century – Dali, without the nonsense, pretention and bombast.  He also seemed to be obsessed with beautiful, imposing buildings, and how they scaled against the human form.

Willink died in Amsterdam having lived through all of the significant artistic and historical events of the last century.  Some of his canvases almost seem like an attic filled with mid-century triumphs and anxieties.

Today’s painting, View of the Town, painted in 1934, is by any critical yardstick a masterpiece.  It’s not simply that Willink beautifully rendered the details of the building, the cobblestone street and the wall in the distance, but also that he was able to create an entire mood through the skill of his composition and the technique of his lighting.

The broad expanse of street, with its looming shadows, creates a sense of anxiety and unease.  The absence of people adds to the overall menacing aspect, as does the fact that nothing is visible inside of any of these windows.

A sense of expectation is also created by the approaching storm, which he painted not just in the sky, but with his shades of gray upon the landscape itself.  This muted palette, open composition and feeling of dread anticipation all result in a picture that is beautiful, ethereal and disquieting.