Landscape with Wall, 1930

Landscape with Wall of 1930 is a particularly outstanding milestone in Josef Dobrowsky’s (1889–1964) exploration of and approximation to New Objectivity. The wall with its two black portals opening top the unknown is reminiscent of a film set and look like put together from pieces of flat cardboard. With their very reduced depiction, the surfaces appear smooth. The almost black branches of a leafless tree segment a green area in the background which brings to mind a deciduous forest. The abstracted exploration of shape and color and the radical composition do not represent any existing real-life world btu establish a parallel reality. Like in numerous work before and after, e.g. in Landscape with Aggstein Castle Ruin, Dobrowsky keeps using the menace of an approaching storm as an atmospheric element.

RR, 2021