Franz Radziwill - Landschaft mit zwei Felsen - image-1

Lot 39 D

Franz Radziwill - Landschaft mit zwei Felsen

Auction 1177 - overview Cologne
17.06.2021, 18:00 - Modern/Contemporary Art - Evening Sale
Estimate: 100.000 € - 120.000 €
Result: 150.000 € (incl. premium)

Franz Radziwill

Landschaft mit zwei Felsen
1947

Oil on canvas, mounted on panel 54.5 x 71.5 cm Framed. Signed 'Franz Radziwill' in grey lower margin to right of centre. - Overall in fine condition.

In Franz Radziwill's late landscapes, space and time fall apart - or collapse in on themselves. In a montage-like manner, the artist's works develop mental landscapes that merge fragments from highly disparate contexts into fictive tableaux. They are impossible landscapes whose various recurring narrative components and pictorial elements fundamentally call into question traditional concepts of space.
At the time our painting was created, the familiar world was still largely off its hinges: after his deployment in the “Volkssturm” militia of the Nazis and his internment by the British during the final phase of World War II, Franz Radziwill was also looking forward to a period of reawakening during the years directly after the war. In many respects, those years represented a transitional phase in which the past, present and future became superimposed on one another.
In an indeterminate space between apocalypse and vision, our painting - which has been prominently exhibited many times - presents viewers with a world in which the old principles of order have long since been in a state of deterioration: in an open landscape two rock formations stand opposite one another, monoliths before meadows and fields whose sometimes geometric patterns stir memories of both a lost central perspective and nature. While the branches of the dead trees in the foreground no longer appear to bear any life within them, this makes the green of the vegetation behind seem all the more vibrant. Radziwill has composed the sky as the illusion of a wooden panel tearing open in the middle: a glimpse into an indefinite space opens up behind a spherical celestial body, and a swift flies in from the right.

Catalogue Raisonné

Firmenich/Schulze 591

Provenance

Galleria d'Arte Stivani, Bologna (paper adhesive label verso); Private collection, Italy; Private collection, France

Exhibitions

Bremen/Cologne 1948 (Graphisches Kabinett/Galerie Aloys Faust), no cat. no.; Wilhelmshaven 1949 (Kunsthalle), no cat. no.; Goslar 1952 (Museum Goslar), no cat. no.; Oldenburg 1955 (Kunstverein, cat. no. 38; Berlin 1957 (Nationalgalerie), cat. no. 40; Unterkochen 1959 (Fa. Wöhr Eisenwerke), no cat. no.; Düsseldorf 1970 (Galerie Wendtorf & Swetec), cat. no. 24; Gießen 1970 (Bürgerhaus), cat. no. 17; Bremen/Hanover 1970 (Kunsthalle/Kunstverein), cat. no. 25, Trier/Koblenz 1972 (Städtisches Museum/Mittelrhein-Museum), without cat. no.