Carel Willink

Albert Carel Willink (Dutch: [ˈɑlbərt ˈkaːrəl ˈʋɪlɪnk]; 7 March 1900 – 19 October 1983) was a Dutch painter who called his style of Magic realism “imaginary realism“. Albert Carel Willink was born on 7 March 1900 in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He was the eldest son of the mechanic Jan Willink and Wilhelmina Altes. His father was an amateur artist who encouraged his son to paint. After briefly studying medicine, in 1918-19 Willink studied architecture at the Technische Hogeschool in Delft. Afterwards he left for Germany, where he failed to get into the academy in Düsseldorf. He later studied for a short time at the Staatliche Hochschule in Berlin. Willink’s earliest paintings were in an expressionist manner, although he also painted abstract works at the time that he exhibited with the November group in 1923. By 1924 he had adopted a figurative style influenced by Picasso’s neoclassical paintings of the early 1920s