Lot 38 D

This representative painting from 1922 is a remarkable manifesto of Franz Radziwill's engagement with the Expressionist painting of his contemporaries. The renunciation of the landscape's modelling in relief in favour of a pronounced two-dimensionality, the plunging perspective and, particularly, the palette emphasising the primary colours unmistakably demonstrate the lasting impression that the works of the “Brücke” artists - especially Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel - must have made on the artist.
Schmidt-Rottluff had met Franz Radziwill at Wilhelm Niemeyer's in April 1921. He was also the one who recommended that Radziwill discover Dangast for himself - that village which was also so important for his own work as an artist. After initially travelling back and forth between Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin and Dangast, Radziwill moved to the village on the Jade Bay in 1922. Under the title “Dangaster Künstler im Lappan”, he would already exhibit his works together with those of Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff in Oldenburg that same year. Three years later, the artist also presented our painting to the public in Oldenburg.
“Landschaft mit gelben Bäumen” demonstrates that Franz Radziwill did not simply imitate the Expressionism of the “Brücke” and, instead, individually responded to it and elaborated upon it. Thus, for example, he has expanded the palette defined by complementary contrasts through the use of grey and black passages, which interact with the chromatic accords of the houses, fields and flame-like trees to evoke an atmospheric image heralding the mysticism and magic of later phases in his work. An unreal, almost uncanny effect emanates from this scene featuring a luminous landscape caught in the vortex of a nocturnally darkened pictorial space where there no longer seems to be anything left for viewers to hold on to.