Winter in the City, 1931

Despite its darkness and heaviness, the 1931 work Winter in the City by Franz Sedlacek (1891, missing since 1945) appears as a world within the world. The people going about their daily business, playing and ice-skating, live in this world; some of them withdrawn, some of them engaged in conversation. The microcosm seems so self-contained that our perception of it appears to have no bearing on its inhabitants. Grotesquely, the village in the mountains recalls an area around a train station or an industrial suburb. The colors of the facades are only vaguely discernable under what looks like a layer of dust. The areas of snow appear like luminous gaps between them. The plain houses, with their identical-looking small black holes for windows, only differ from one another through nuances of color, their size and position within the painting. A lantern has gone out, a stray dog is looking for food, while a man on the left edge of the depiction is observing the scene – much like the beholders of this work.

RR, 2021