Early work by Lodewijk Karel Bruckman

"Les Frères Bruckman", 1923.  *

Lodewijk Karel "Loki" Bruckman (14 August 1903, The Hague – 24 April 1995, Leeuwarden), Dutch magic realist painter.  More successful in the United States than in his home country, he is best known for his surrealistic still lifes; his style is often compared to Dali's.

The son of a house painter, he was one of five children.  He and his twin brother, Karel Lodewijk Bruckman (1903–1982), attended The Hague's Royal Academy of Art together.  He first worked as a set painter and drawing teacher, before making his career as a fine artist.  In 1949, he and his life partner and manager Evert Zeeven moved to the United States.  They lived together in New York City and Provincetown, and also in Morelia in Mexico, but returned to the Netherlands in 1968.  Zeeven died at the end of 1993, and Bruckman followed a year and a half later at the age of ninety-one.

Portrait of Theo Bitter, 1933.

"Studio Bruckman", 1932.

Self-portrait, 1935.

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*  I'm a bit unsure about the authorship of this first image, the double portrait of the Bruckman twin brothers.  It would be a very early work, which might easily explain the radically different style.  But what confuses the issue is that the work is always reproduced as being the work of "Karel Bruckman".  The brothers were named Lodewijk Karel - the artist featured in this post - and Karel Lodewijk.  And though I can't find any information about an art career by the latter, both twins studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague; could this very interesting painting be the work of the "other" brother?