Landscape with rainbow

For the first painters to settle in Ahrenshoop, the visible appearance of the landscape in natural skylight was the central artistic theme. The following generation, scarred by the First World War, was only able to pick up on this to a limited extent. Although they too sought nature, they were concerned with a different philosophical understanding.

Alfred Partikel, born in East Prussia, came from the landscape in the spirit of the Berlin Secession before the First World War. After marrying Dorothea Körte, a relative of Martin Körte from the first generation of the artists' colony, he found his summer working base with rural connections in Ahrenshoop in 1921. This constellation shaped his work for the rest of his life. Partikel, who had survived the war with a severe hearing impairment, had initially returned to Berlin and resumed the connections he had forged with the avant-garde there since 1911. He regularly participated in the exhibitions of the Secession. His colour-intensive, sensitive paintings already speak around 1920 of the longing for healing in the artistic search for the lost paradise. The "Landscape with Rainbow" seems like a jubilant painting in this context. Partikel painted it on the occasion of his daughter Barbara, the first of the artist's three children, who was born in Ahrenshoop in 1922. In doing so, he drew on Old Master pictorial tradition and Christian symbolism. Dorothea Partikel is enthroned like a Madonna against the background of the wide, panoramic Bodden landscape. The child lies on the ground in front of her. With her arms she describes a magical radius in the vertical and horizontal of the room. The gesture seems dance-like and consecratory. As a sign of the covenant with God, the rainbow reinforces the sacredness of the scene. Admittedly, the wide landscape in the background is not necessarily to be interpreted as a "world landscape" in the medieval sense, but as a quotation it does contain the motif. In the setting of mother and child, the place is strangely fragmentary and alienated in an expressionistic way, as a mirror of strong feelings. In the distance, the picture closes into a homogeneous landscape, but this too is by no means "real". Rather, the little town on the Bodden seems like a mirage that transforms into a paradise under the rainbow.