Dachauer Landschaft mit weißem Felsen 1900

Adolf Hölzel painted this landscape of Dachau with oil on canvas. He was a co-founder of the New Dachau Art School. Hölzel lived and worked in a period defined by the shift from traditional artistic representation to abstraction. His own movement towards abstraction can be seen as a search for new forms of expression and a move away from established norms. The landscape is rendered in muted browns and grays, and this limited palette evokes a feeling of melancholy. The white rocks stand out, perhaps symbolic of purity or hope amidst the somber tones of the rest of the landscape. This work can be seen as representing the artist's emotional response to his surroundings, a personal interpretation of the natural world that reflects the social and cultural anxieties of his time.