Brusselmans’ parents worked in a sewing workshop when he was born in 1884 in Brussels. He had three siblings, most notably his younger brother Michel Brusselmans who became a composer. As a child, Brusselmans displayed a special talent for drawing and painting, but it took a long time for him to make art his profession. Around the turn of the century, he followed evening classes and after a brief career as an engraver and lithographer, he took the final step to become an artist. He resigned from his job and dropped out of classes at the Brussels art academy. Together with fellow-student Rik Wouters he rented an attic studio in Brussels. A few years later he met Marie Frisch, whom he married; she was his source of inspiration and his only model.

He quickly came to be viewed as a member of the Flemish expressionist School of Sint-Martens-Latem, named after the East Flanders village where that group of artists had long set up residence. Yet Brusselmans soon found that he did not fully integrate with this group. In 1924, he moved to a hill outside the Brussels suburb Dilbeek, nowadays a suburb to the west of Brussels. He named his home "Kouden Haard" (Cold Hearth). The material poverty conveyed by the name became his artistic battle cry, as he wrote: “Je suis le peintre du Kouden Haard”. From his small studio, on the first floor of his modest house, he would look out on the village and the beautiful Flemish Pajottenland, the small church with its short, fat tower, the rolling fields, orchards, and pastures with cows. From then on, he painted and repainted the landscape he saw from the window of his studio over and over again.

Thus, the paintings of Brusselmans are characterized by an endless iteration of the same surroundings and a limited selection of everyday objects: a fan, two scallops, his wife's checked dress, a wooden coffee grinder, a kerosene lamp. At first glance, his oeuvre offers a glimpse of Brusselmans' day-to-day life. However, the private display of daily objects was not a portrayal of the real world. Reality might have been his starting point, but painting remained the higher goal. He depicted his subjects two-dimensionally, creating volume solely through an emphasis on color and form. He combined several destabilizing perspectives in one single image and used a sharp contrast between dark and light. This heaviness, so characteristic of other Belgian painters during the interwar period, gives way to the suggestion of light.

Despite the poverty that almost constantly plagued the family, he built up a unique body of work. In the 1920s, he developed a form where mathematical precision and a deep human sensitivity did not seem to interfere with each other. On the contrary, he shifted the rules of constructive figuration. He combined the different components with a mixture of intuition, a sense of geometry and repetition, to eventually go further than his expressionist contemporaries. In the work emerging from 1934 to 1936, Brusselmans organized his compositions in a more clean-cut fashion. He excelled in simplified compositions, whether they involved large figures, intimate landscapes, or seascapes.

After some rough years after WWII, he exhibited in 1947 in Galerie de France in Paris where the French critics met him with unanimous praise. During his final years, he experimented with gestures and wild expressions, which he used in both the schematic representation and in the complication of many visual elements stacked together. His last retrospective exhibition was held at the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels in 1952. He passed away a few months later.

Works by Brusselmans can be found in the collections of the Kunstmuseum, Den Haag; the Stedelijk, Amsterdam; The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp; Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent; and Groeninge Museum, Bruges.

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