Lot 43 D

In 1923 Franz Radziwill painted a colourful and cheerful painting: “Dorflandschaft”. Coming from Berlin, he had just married, bought a house and settled in Dangast. For the next six decades, his work as an artist would centre around this village on the edge of the Jade Bight. “No picture by me is possible without Dangast.”
This contented sense of having arrived is also reflected in the etching “Dorflandschaft” (Wv 27 1923, cf. comparative ill.), which was created at the same time and features the same motif and title. Here, as in the case of the painting, his house at 3 Sielstraße is surrounded by flowers and protected by a tree. He was doing well – and things were going well. His career was on an upward trajectory: “Passive Members of the BRÜCKE” from Hamburg purchased 27 pictures. In Berlin he was able to exhibit his works with those of Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Otto Dix and Wassily Kandinsky. In Amsterdam they were shown with those of the leading German expressionists in the Stedelijk Museum.
However, ill-fated and infinitely fraught years soon followed: his paintings were considered “degenerate”. 274 works, including 59 paintings, were confiscated from museums, denounced, burned. Appalled and humiliated, the painter retreated to his house at the edge of the horizon.
And then: the painting “Dorflandschaft” – created under the fortunate circumstances of 1923 – suddenly and unexpectedly stood on his easel again in 1963. Was it a testament to that other, long-gone time, a pleasant memory of better days? No, not for Franz Radziwill! He thought differently, he “continued painting”, brought it up to date. In his hands, this canvas was transformed into a testament spanning four decades. He inscribed the progressed time into this and almost 60 other paintings. Radziwill did not understand himself in terms of a witness of a moment in the past. Quite the contrary: in 1963 the painting “Dorflandschaft” – now retitled “Rindvieh führt Rindvieh” – concentrated together a larger span of time spanning four decades. The painter has recognised and preserved the flowers of peace – and inserted the instruments of war, which repeatedly flew over his house. He has recognised and preserved those years of happiness – and the bitter traces of the unhappiness that man brings upon man. A wise image, in which the artist has brought more together than o n e moment.

Gerd Presler