Lot 70 D

An enigmatic landscape: the painter has repeatedly disjointed and distorted the image's perspective, taken every liberty of a chromatically unfettered composition, shattered our habits of vision and conjured up the “reality behind reality”. The Apocalypse is no longer part of a distant future. It has taken hold of the present. This becomes clear in the detail which opens up at the bottom of the right half of the picture: near a red path and a green corner of lawn, the earth opens up, revealing a bright, supernatural star shining before an unworldly blue. The drama repeats itself multiple times up into a celestial space that evokes an apocalyptic scenario with mythological figures and rhythms from the vocabulary of Hieronymus Bosch. These events also affect the immediate surroundings of the painter: his storm-shaken home of Dangast (right of the middle, in the green field) breaks apart. Beneath a menacingly veiled celestial body, the cosmic catastrophe takes hold of the beach, the windmill at the entrance to the village and the boats on the Jade Bight. What man has made is smashed against a sheer cliff. A figure dressed in black and white, emerging from the cabinet of Giorgio de Chirico, approaches four burial mounds beneath a hold smashed in the sky.
1957 was the year that the painter established his exceptional position as a “Magical Realist” with a major retrospective at East Berlin's Nationalgalerie. The painting “Die bunten Felder” belongs to that part of the “New Objectivity”, which has been clearly delineated by art historians. It demonstrates Radziwill's absolutely exceptional position. (Gerd Presler)