In the 1920s, Gottfried Brockmann belonged to the artists' group Kölner Progressive around the painters Franz Wilhelm Seiwert and Heinrich Hoerle, whose common intention was to document the people and social structures of their time in pictures. Their basic question was the seriousness of life and art, as Hans Schmitt-Rost (publicist, 1901 Essen – 1978 Cologne) describes it: "Our life was by no means unrestrained, anarchic, amoral, rather thoughtful, modest, frugal, humane."

His work is characterized by a kind of realism that can be described as both naïve and magical at the same time, because the artist approaches the objects and figures with great sympathy and does not take away their magic, their enigma. Brockmann wittily plays with pictorial contradictions such as space and surface and the motivic irony against the background of a mostly constructed pictorial framework.