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Lot description
Signed 'Franz Radziwill' in red lower right. Inscribed with work number '557' in red-brown verso. There can scarcely be another artist who had Franz Radziwill’s ability to imbue a naturalistic landscape with unearthly and mysterious elements, combining the beautiful with the unfathomable. Here, he has composed a nocturnal winter landscape in a richly detailed manner of painting. The snow-covered plain is divided up through a stand of bare deciduous trees and a row of evergreens with three buildings nestled up against them. But this rural idyll is filled with elements that do not seem to be of this world. Menacing, amorphously fissured boulders grow up out of the earth in the foreground, and the gigantic celestial disc floating above it all is reminiscent of a machine component. The palette of colours breaking through the natural brown, grey and white of a winter night is also surreal. The sky, which features a pink crescent moon, glows in broad strips of cobalt blue and green while the celestial disc shines in yellow and red like an artificial sun. The colours radiate down on to the landscape and streaks of them spread through the snow. A mysterious apparition between the two groups of trees leads a chromatic life of its own, and its gently curving arabesques call to mind a bodiless dancing dervish. “Der Winter ist schön” formerly belonged to the collection of Georg Düser (1888-1982). This neurologist and writer from Oldenburg was interested in art and, after he met Franz Radziwill in Dangast in 1923, a close friendship bound the two men for the rest of their lives. Extremely fascinated by the artist’s work, Düser very methodically built up a significant collection of paintings over the decades, playing an essential part in Franz Radziwill’s increasing popularity.