It has recently been hanging proudly on the wall of the Expressionist Collection of the Ostwall Museum in the so-called “Dortmunder U”: Christian Rohlf's oil painting “Jüngling am Scheidewege” from 1917, clearly monogrammed and dated in the lower right corner with “CR 17”.

It is unusual within Rohlfs' otherwise rather small-format oeuvre because at 124 by 118 meters it is the largest picture he has ever painted.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the features section.

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It shows a young man in a red robe in conversation with an older, veiled figure on the left and a younger woman; his face is turned to the younger one, who puts her right hand on his back and speaks to him. Where the scene takes place remains unclear: the flat background with its Edvard Munch-like bumps suggests a steeply rising path above the young man's head, which is just as flat as his red coat. The expressive color scheme - an exciting complementary contrast between red and green - underscores the importance of the decision to be made here. Because the figure, wrapped in a brown-green hooded coat, who looks less like a monk than more like an elderly woman, holds his hands on his cheeks,which acts like a gesture of despair over seen disaster. Rohlfs hints at the careworn and suffering through the angular shape of her nose, while the younger woman has a delicately curved bridge of her nose.

The Herculean task of decision

In this disposition - a seductive lady with a dress belted tightly at the waist, lipstick, drawn eyebrows and a lush cleavage presumably wants to move a young man to something and is about to gently but firmly move him in her direction with her hand on his shoulder draw - the composition is reminiscent of the widely painted iconography of "Hercules Prodikos", which has been known since ancient times. This is the prototype of the hero at the crossroads; the art historian Erwin Panofsky dedicated one of his most lucid essays to him: The one path that is available is steep, thorny and full of stones and only brings fame after going through a lot of hard work. The second path is seductively effortless and flat, but does not lead to the top.In ancient Greece, the subject depicting virtue and vice in natural space was so widespread that a simple “Y” was sometimes enough to symbolize the trepidation of Hercules to the viewer. Even in the Old Testament there is the Babylonian king in Ezekiel 21:21, who stands by a scabbard between “two ways that he may let himself be prophesied”. The biblical artist was also familiar with this passage, so that his picture presumably shows a synthesis of Ezekiel and a form of the Herculean crossroads that has been transferred to the modern age and detoxified by lion's skin and club.that he let himself be prophesied ”. The biblical artist was also familiar with this passage, so that his picture presumably shows a synthesis of Ezekiel and a form of the Herculean crossroads that has been transferred to the modern age and detoxified by lion's skin and club.that he let himself be prophesied ”. The biblical artist was also familiar with this passage, so that his picture presumably shows a synthesis of Ezekiel and a form of the Herculean crossroads that has been transferred to the modern age and detoxified by lion's skin and club.

Rohlfs' painting is a picture of conflict in the literal sense of the word: A decision has not yet been made, a curved, sun-yellow line runs through the middle of the young man's bright red robe, as if it were the hem of the skirt. The energetic yellow goes into the legs and into the strange hoof-like shoes as well as over and over his right shoulder. Here it seems as if the color of the sun forked like a rod, which would not only double the crossroads visually and in terms of content, but also the interpretation.

With the divining rod in yellow, next to the crossroads between Greek mythology and the Bible, a third, biographical one would be obvious: Rohlfs - like many others - was plunged into a creative and meaning crisis by the First World War. At the time when the “crossroads” came into being in 1917, he tried harder to cope with the mass deaths with religious and mythological images. The figure with the widow-like veiled face could stand for death and war, the young woman for new beginnings and the future. In doing so, Rohlfs would not only have painted a persistence picture for self-mobilization, but also reversed the traditional iconography of the crossroads: opulence instead of bitterness.

The picture fits particularly well into the Dortmund Museum Ostwall, which already has twenty-five works by Christian Rohlfs, because the curator Leonie Reygers focused on this phase of the artist in the 1950s and 1960s.

From 1901 onwards, at the invitation of Karl Ernst Osthaus in Hagen, the painter came up with the style that also makes “Am Scheidewege” unique: the expressive color surface replaces perspective, but at the same time dramatizes the message.

As crystal clear as in a medieval church window, a basic human experience is formulated here in a valid way.