Lot 8 D

Three earthen jugs: they are from the workshop of his father, the master potter Eduard Radziwill, an impoverished and rebellious member of the old Polish aristocracy. And now they live on in the art of his son: painted vessels made of clay and fire, reflecting the light in their glaze. Messengers from another time accompanied by everyday objects from the present. A plate, a fork and a tin can on which the painter has written his name: Radziwill Franz. He has arrived in the present of 1929. This still life concentrates on the unremarkable, unheeded things of everyday life. And then there is a rupture: in the words of art historian Roland März, it becomes possible to see how “the fatal entanglements with the unreal and surreal emerge in the seams and gaps of the real”. Here – where the calm order of inanimate objects had only just reigned – a broken egg alludes to the bitter truth that life is a dangerous place, embroiled from the very beginning in the coexistence of success, futility, ephemerality and loss. Here the “vanitas” concept of Dutch painting becomes concrete. Radziwill was familiar with it from his visits to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Above all, however: magnificent painting! The artist has successfully captured the materiality of the clay medium, the delicacy of a piece of bread and the texture developed over the decades in the wood of the tabletop.

Gerd Presler