Biografia
A year after his birth, Franz Radziwill and his family moved to Bremen. He first attended elementary school there. This was followed by an apprenticeship as a bricklayer between 1909 and 1912. After his one-year journeyman ship, he studied architecture from 1913 at the Technical State School of Architecture in Bremen, which he attended until 1915. He also attended evening courses at the local college of design and dedicated himself to figurative drawing. He experienced the First World War as a soldier and was taken prisoner by the British from 1918 to 1919. He then resumed his art studies. In 1920 Franz Radziwill moved to Berlin. There he took part in an exhibition of the "Free Secession" and made the acquaintance of Otto Dix. In 1921, Radziwill stayed in the North Sea resort of Dangast for the first time. Through his friendship with Otto Dix, Radziwill entered the artistic circles of the "Neue Sachlichkeit". In it, Radziwill developed a magical-realistic expressiveness. Apocalyptic moods of the sky and light were depicted in large views.
In 1922, the painter presented his pictures in a joint exhibition with Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. In 1923 Radziwill married Johanna Ingeborg Haase, with whom he moved to Dangast. In 1931 Radziwill became a member of the "November Group" in Berlin, and from 1933 to 1935 he succeeded Paul Klee as head of the master class at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. In 1938, the National Socialists classified 52 of his works as "degenerate art" and banned him from working and exhibiting. Radziwill was expelled from the NSDAP. Between 1939 and 1942 he took part in the Second World War as a soldier. In 1942 his wife died. This was followed by an exemption from military service and an obligation to work as a technical draftsman at the Heinen machine factory in Varel. After the war, the painter married Inge Rauer-Riechelmann in 1947, who gave birth to his daughter Konstanze in the same year. This was followed by exhibitions at home and abroad, where he received numerous honors and awards. In 1963 he received the Rome Prize from the German Academy and a year of study at the Villa Massimo in Rome. Two years later he was presented with the Grand Cross for the North German Order of Merit and in 1970 the Great North German State Prize.
In 1971, Radziwill was awarded the Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Typical of his late work, he incorporated technical symbols such as factory buildings, steel bridges, cranes and airplanes with extreme attention to detail. Due to progressive poor eyesight, Radziwill gave up painting in 1972. A retrospective was shown in Berlin in 1981 with great interest from the art world. Franz Radziwill's works show an intensive preoccupation with the connection between technology, people and nature in development and impact. The content documents the technical development between 1907 and 1970. His motifs are primarily aircraft, ships and technical industrial buildings. Radzwill's image content moves between two poles of tension. On the one hand, the painter elevates the technology to the status of a myth. In this he is in contemporary harmony with avant-garde movements such as Russian Constructivism. On the other hand, the demonic character of the image expresses Radziwill's skeptical criticism of technology, which is based, among other things, on his experience of two world wars. He fills the space between these two points of view with numerous interpretations of technical achievements.
