Franz Radziwill Landscape with two rocks 1947 Oil... Lot 39

Franz Radziwill Landscape with two rocks 1947 Oil on canvas on wood 54.5 x 71.5 cm Framed. Signed 'Franz Radziwill' in grey on the lower margin right of centre. - Overall in fine condition. Firmenich/Schulze 591 Provenance Galleria d'Arte Stivani, Bologna (with paper label on reverse); private collection, Italy; private collection, France Exhibitions Bremen/Cologne 1948 (Graphisches Kabinett/Galerie Aloys Faust), o. cat. No.; Wilhelmshaven 1949 (Kunsthalle), o. cat. No.; Goslar 1952 (Museum Goslar), o. cat. No.; Oldenburg 1955 (Kunstverein, cat. No. 38; Berlin 1957 (Nationalgalerie), cat. No. 40; Unterkochen 1959 (Fa. Wöhr Eisenwerke), o. 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), o. cat. no. In Franz Radziwill's late landscapes, space and time fall apart - or into each other. In a montage-like manner, the artist develops landscapes of thought in his works, which bring together fragments of the most diverse contexts in fictitious tableaus. These are impossible landscapes whose diverse narrative set pieces and pictorial elements fundamentally question traditional concepts of spatiality. At the time of our painting's creation, the known world was still to a large extent unhinged - after serving in the Volksturm and his imprisonment in England in the final phase of the Second World War, Franz Radziwill also faced a time of new beginnings in the immediate post-war years. In many respects, these years represent an intermediate phase in which past, present and future overlap. In the tension between apocalypse and vision, our painting, which has been prominently exhibited many times, presents the viewer with a world in which old principles of order have long since begun to disintegrate: In an open landscape, two rocks face each other, monoliths in front of meadows and fields, their partly geometric patterns evoking memories equally of a lost central perspective and nature. While the branches of dead trees in the foreground seem to have no life left in them, the green of the vegetation behind them seems all the more vital. Radziwill creates the sky as an illusion of a wooden panel that tears open in the middle: behind a spherical celestial body, the viewer's gaze opens into an indefinite space; a swift flies in from the right.