Caspar David Friedrich

Gerhard von Kügelgen, Portrait of Caspar David Friedrich (c. 1810–20)

Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important of the movement. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes, which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's work characteristically sets the human element in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".

Friedrich was born in the Swedish Pomeranian town of Greifswald, where he began his studies in art as a youth. Later, he studied in Copenhagen until 1798, before settling in Dresden. He came of age during a period when, across Europe, a growing disillusionment with materialistic society was giving rise to a new appreciation of spirituality. This shift in ideals was often expressed through a reevaluation of the natural world, as artists such as Friedrich, J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) and John Constable (1776–1837) sought to depict nature as a "divine creation, to be set against the artifice of human civilization".

Friedrich’s work brought him renown early in his career, and contemporaries such as the French sculptor David d'Angers (1788–1856) spoke of him as a man who had discovered "the tragedy of landscape". However, his work fell from favour during his later years, and he died in obscurity, and in the words of the art historian Philip Miller, "half mad". As Germany moved towards modernisation in the late 19th century, a new sense of urgency characterised its art, and Friedrich’s contemplative depictions of stillness came to be seen as the products of a bygone age. The early 20th century brought a renewed appreciation of his work, beginning in 1906 with an exhibition of thirty-two of his paintings and sculptures in Berlin. By the 1920s his paintings had been discovered by the Expressionists, and in the 1930s and early 1940s Surrealists and Existentialists frequently drew ideas from his work. The rise of Nazism in the early 1930s again saw a resurgence in Friedrich's popularity, but this was followed by a sharp decline as his paintings were, by association with the Nazi movement, misinterpreted as having a nationalistic aspect. It was not until the late 1970s that Friedrich regained his reputation as an icon of the German Romantic movement and a painter of international importance.

Life

Early years and family

Caspar David Friedrich was born on September 5, 1774, in Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania, on the Baltic coast of Germany. The sixth of ten children, he was brought up in the strict Lutheran creed of his father Adolf Gottlieb Friedrich, a candle-maker and soap boiler. Records of the family's financial circumstances are contradictory; while some sources indicate the children were privately tutored, others record that they were raised in relative poverty. Caspar David was familiar with death from an early age. His mother, Sophie Dorothea Bechly, died in 1781 when he was just seven. A year later, his sister Elisabeth died, while a second sister, Maria, succumbed to typhus in 1791. Arguably the greatest tragedy of his childhood was the 1787 death of his brother Johann Christoffer: at the age of thirteen, Caspar David witnessed his younger brother fall through the ice of a frozen lake and drown. Some accounts suggest that Johann Christoffer perished while trying to rescue Caspar David, who was also in danger on the ice.

Caspar David Friedrich, Self-portrait (1800). Chalk drawing, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen

Friedrich began his formal study of art in 1790 as a private student of artist Johann Gottfried Quistorp at the University of Greifswald. Quistorp took his students on outdoor drawing excursions; as a result, Friedrich was encouraged to sketch from life at an early age. Through Quistorp, Friedrich met and was subsequently influenced by the theologian Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, who taught that nature was a revelation of God. Quistorp introduced Friedrich to the work of the German 17th-century artist Adam Elsheimer, whose works often included religious subjects dominated by landscape, and nocturnal subjects. During this period he also studied literature and aesthetics with Swedish professor Thomas Thorild. Four years later Friedrich entered the prestigious Academy of Copenhagen, where he began his education by making copies of casts from antique sculptures before proceeding to drawing from life. Living in Copenhagen afforded the young painter access to the Royal Picture Gallery’s collection of 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. At the Academy he studied under teachers such as Christian August Lorentzen and the landscape painter Jens Juel. These artists were inspired by the Sturm und Drang movement and represented a midpoint between the dramatic intensity and expressive manner of the budding Romantic aesthetic and the waning neo-classical ideal. Mood was paramount, and influence was drawn from such sources as the Icelandic legend of Edda, the poems of Ossian and Norse mythology.

Friedrich settled permanently in Dresden in 1798. During this early period, he experimented in printmaking with etchings and designs for woodcuts which his furniture-maker brother cut. By 1804 he had produced 18 etchings and four woodcuts; they were apparently made in small numbers and only distributed to friends. Despite these forays into other media, he gravitated toward working primarily with ink, watercolour and sepias. With the exception of a few early pieces, such as Landscape with Temple in Ruins (1797), he did not work extensively with oils until his reputation was more established. Landscapes were his preferred subject, inspired by frequent trips, beginning in 1801, to the Baltic coast, Bohemia, the Riesen and the Harz Mountains. Mostly based on the landscapes of northern Germany, his paintings depict woods, hills, harbors, morning mists and other light effects based on a close observation of nature. These works were modeled on sketches and studies of scenic spots, such as the cliffs on Rügen, the surroundings of Dresden and the river Elbe. He executed his studies almost exclusively in pencil, even providing topographical information, yet the subtle atmospheric effects characteristic of Friedrich's mid-period paintings were rendered from memory. These effects took their strength from the depiction of light, and of the illumination of sun and moon on clouds and water: optical phenomena peculiar to the Baltic coast that had never before been painted with such an emphasis.

Move to Dresden

Friedrich established his reputation as an artist when he won a prize in 1805 at the Weimar competition organised by the writer, poet, and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). At the time, the Weimar competition tended to draw mediocre and now long-forgotten artists presenting derivative mixtures of neo-classical and pseudo-Greek styles. The poor quality of the entries began to prove damaging to Goethe's reputation, so when Friedrich entered two sepia drawings—Procession at Dawn and Fisher-Folk by the Sea—the poet responded enthusiastically and wrote, "We must praise the artist's resourcefulness in this picture fairly. The drawing is well done, the procession is ingenious and appropriate … his treatment combines a great deal of firmness, diligence and neatness … the ingenious watercolour … is also worthy of praise."

The Tetschen Altar, or The Cross in the Mountains (1807). 115 × 110.5 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Dresden. Friedrich's first major work, the piece breaks with the traditions of representing the crucifixion in altarpieces by depicting the scene as a landscape.

Friedrich completed the first of his major paintings in 1807, at the age of 34. The Cross in the Mountains, today known as the Tetschen Altar (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), is an altarpiece panel commissioned by the Countess of Thun for her family's chapel in Tetschen, Bohemia. It was to be one of the few commissions the artist received. The altar panel depicts the crucified Christ in profile at the top of a mountain, alone and surrounded by nature. The cross reaches the highest point in the pictorial plane but is presented from an oblique and a distant viewpoint, unusual for a crucifixion scene in Western art. Nature dominates the scene and for the first time in Christian art, an altarpiece showcases a landscape. According to the art historian Linda Siegel, the design of the altarpiece is the "logical climax of many earlier drawings of his which depicted a cross in nature's world."

The work was first exhibited on Christmas day, 1808. Although it was generally coldly received, it was nevertheless Friedrich's first painting to receive wide publicity. The artist’s friends publicly defended the work, while art critic Basilius von Ramdohr published a lengthy article rejecting Friedrich's use of landscape in such a context; he wrote that it would be "a veritable presumption, if landscape painting were to sneak into the church and creep onto the altar". Ramdohr fundamentally challenged the concept that pure landscape painting could convey explicit meaning. Friedrich responded with a programme describing his intentions. In his 1809 commentary on the painting, he compared the rays of the evening sun to the light of the Holy Father. The sinking of the sun suggests that the era when God revealed himself directly to man has passed. This statement marked the only time Friedrich recorded a detailed interpretation of his own work.

In The Monk by the Sea (1809–10), Friedrich shows a seascape covered by dark and heavy mist. Light is shown only higher up on the canvas, in the tips of the trees and the ruins of the church. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Friedrich was elected a member of the Berlin Academy in 1810 following the purchase of two of his paintings by the Prussian Crown Prince. Yet in 1816, he sought to distance himself from Prussian authority, and that June applied for Saxon citizenship. The move was unexpected by his friends, as the Saxon government of the time was pro-French, while Friedrich's paintings to date were seen as generally patriotic and distinctly anti-French. However, with the aid of his Dresden-based friend Graf Vitzthum von Eckstädt, Friedrich attained not only citizenship, but in 1818, a place in the Saxon Academy as a member with a yearly dividend of 150 thalers. Although he hoped to receive a full Professorship, it was never awarded him as, according to the German Library of Information, "it was felt that his painting was too personal, his point of view too individual to serve as a fruitful example to students."

Marriage and success

On January 21, 1818, Friedrich married Caroline Bommer, then twenty-five years old and the daughter of a dyer from Dresden. The couple had three children, with their first, Emma, arriving in 1820. Physiologist and painter Carl Gustav Carus notes in his biographical essays that marriage did not impact significantly on either Friedrich's life or personality, yet his canvasses from this period, including Chalk Cliffs on Rügen—painted after his honeymoon—display a new sense of levity, while his palette is brighter and less austere. Human figures appear with increasing frequency in the paintings of this period, which Siegel interprets as a reflection that "the importance of human life, particularly his family, now occupies his thoughts more and more, and his friends, his wife, and his townspeople appear as frequent subjects in his art."

The Stages of Life (Die Lebensstufen), 1835, is a meditation on the artist's own mortality and depicts five ships at various distances from the shore. The foreground similarly depicts five figures of different stages of life. Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig

Around this time, the artist found support from two sources in Russia. The Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich, at the behest of his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, visited Friedrich's studio in 1820, and returned to Saint Petersburg with a number of his paintings. Nikolia's patronage was to continue for many years. The poet Vasily Zhukovsky, tutor to Alexander II, met Friedrich in 1821 and found in him a kindred spirit. Over many years Zhukovsky helped Friedrich by purchasing his work and recommending his art to the royal family, especially at the end of Friedrich's career, by which time he was poor. Zhukovsky said that his friend's paintings "please us by their precision, each of them awakening a memory in our mind."

Friedrich was acquainted with Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810), another leading German painter of the Romantic period. He was a friend of Georg Friedrich Kersting (1785–1847), who painted him at work in his unadorned studio, and the Norwegian painter Johann Christian Dahl (1788–1857). Dahl was close to Friedrich during the artist's last years, and complained that to the art-buying public, Friedrich's pictures were only "curiosities". While the poet Zhukovsky appreciated Friedrich's psychological themes, Dahl praised the descriptive quality of Friedrich's landscapes. Dahl said, "Artists and connoisseurs saw in Friedrich's art only a kind of mystic, because they themselves were only looking out for the mystic … They did not see Friedrich's faithful and conscientious study of nature in everything he represented".

Later life and death

Friedrich's reputation steadily declined over the final fifteen years of his life. As the ideals of early Romanticism passed from fashion, he came to be viewed as an eccentric and melancholy character, out of touch with the times. Gradually his patrons fell away. By 1820, he was living as a recluse, and was described by friends as the "most solitary of the solitary". Towards the end of his life he lived in relative poverty, and was increasingly dependent on the charity of friends. He became isolated and spent long periods of the day and night walking alone through woods and fields, often beginning his strolls before sunlight.

Georg Friedrich Kersting, Caspar David Friedrich in his Studio (1819). 51 × 40 cm. An aged Friedrich is portrayed holding a maulstick at his canvas. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

During the mid-1830s, Friedrich began a series of portraits and he returned to observing himself in nature. However, as the art historian William Vaughan has observed, "He can see himself as a man greatly changed. He is no longer the upright, supportive figure that appeared in "Two Men Contemplating the Moon" in 1819. He is old and stiff...he moves with a stoop".

In June 1835, he suffered his first stroke, which left him with minor limb paralysis and greatly reduced his ability to paint. As a result he was unable to work in oil; instead he was limited to watercolour, sepia and reworking older compositions. Although his vision remained strong, he had lost the full strength of his hand. Yet he was able to produce a final 'black painting', Seashore by Moonlight (1835–36), described by Vaughan as the "darkest of all his shorelines, in which richness of tonality compensates for the lack of his former finesse". Symbols of death appeared in his other work from this period. Soon after his stroke, the Russian royal family purchased a number of his earlier works, and the proceeds allowed him to travel to Teplitz—in today's Czech Republic—to recover.

By 1838, he was capable only of working in a small format. He and his family were living in poverty, and grew increasingly dependent for support on the charity of friends. When he died in May 1840, his passing was little noticed within the artistic community.

Friedrich's reputation and fame were waning by the time of his death in 1840. His artwork was not widely acknowledged during his lifetime, though it complied with the Romantic aesthetic of the time. While the close study of landscape and an emphasis on the spiritual elements of nature were commonplace in contemporary art, his work was too original and personal to be well understood. By 1838, his work no longer sold or received attention from critics; the Romantic movement had been moving away from the early idealism that the artist had helped found. After his death, Carl Gustav Carus wrote a series of articles which paid tribute to the manner in which Friedrich had transformed the conventions of landscape painting. However, Carus' articles placed Friedrich firmly in his time, and did not see the artist as part of a continuing tradition. Only one of his paintings had been reproduced in a print, and that was produced in very few copies.

Art

Landscape

The visualisation and portrayal of landscape in an entirely new manner was Friedrich's key innovation. He created the notion of a landscape full of romantic feeling—die romantische Stimmungslandschaft. His art details a wide range of geographical features, such as rock coasts, forests, and mountain scenes. Friedrich was instrumental in transforming landscape in art from a backdrop subordinated to human drama to a self-contained emotive subject. He often used the landscape to express religious themes. During his time, most of the best-known paintings were viewed as expressions of a religious mysticism. He sought not just to explore the blissful enjoyment of a beautiful view, as in the classic conception, but rather to examine an instant of sublimity, a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature.

"What the newer landscape artists see in a circle of a hundred degrees in Nature they press together unmercifully into an angle of vision of only forty-five degrees. And furthermore, what is in Nature separated by large spaces, is compressed into a cramped space and overfills and oversatiates the eye, creating an unfavorable and disquieting effect on the viewer".—Caspar David Friedrich.

Friedrich said, "The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead." Expansive skies, storms, mist, forests, ruins, and crosses bearing witness to the presence of God are frequent elements in Friedrich's landscapes. Though death finds symbolic expression in boats that move away from shore – a Charon-like motif – and in the poplar tree, it is referenced more directly in paintings like The Abbey in the Oakwood (1808–10), in which monks carry a coffin past an open grave, toward a cross, and through the portal of a church in ruins.

He was one of the first artists to portray winter landscapes in which the land is rendered as stark and dead. Friedrich's winter scenes are solemn and still—according to the art historian Hermann Beenken, Friedrich painted winter scenes in which "no man has yet set his foot. The theme of nearly all the older winter pictures had been less winter itself than life in winter. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it was thought impossible to leave out such motifs as the crowd of skaters, the wanderer...It was Friedrich who first felt the wholly detached and distinctive features of a natural life. Instead of many tones, he sought the one; and so, in his landscape, he subordinated the composite chord into one single basic note".

The Sea of Ice (1823–24), Kunsthalle Hamburg. This scene has been described as "a stunning composition of near and distant forms in an Arctic image". Kunsthalle Hamburg

Bare oak trees and tree stumps, such as those in Raven Tree (c. 1822), Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (c. 1833), and Willow Bush under a Setting Sun (c. 1835), are recurring elements of Friedrich's paintings, symbolizing death. Countering the sense of despair are Friedrich's symbols for redemption: the cross and the clearing sky promise eternal life, and the slender moon suggests hope and the growing closeness of Christ. In his paintings of the sea, anchors often appear on the shore, also indicating a spiritual hope. German literature scholar Alice Kuzniar finds in Friedrich's painting a temporality—an evocation of the passage of time—that is rarely highlighted in the visual arts. In The Abbey in the Oakwood, the movement of the monks away from the open grave and toward the cross and the horizon imparts Friedrich's message that the final destination of man's life lies beyond the grave.

With dawn and dusk constituting prominent themes of his landscapes, Friedrich's own later years were characterized by a growing pessimism. His work becomes darker, revealing a fearsome monumentality. The Wreck of Hope—also known as The Polar Sea or Sea of Ice (1823–24)—perhaps best summarizes Friedrich's ideas and aims at this point, though in such a radical way that the painting was not well received. Completed in 1824, it depicted a grim subject, a shipwreck in the Arctic Ocean; ".... the image he produced, with its grinding slabs of travertine-colored floe ice chewing up a wooden ship, goes beyond documentary into allegory: the frail bark of human aspiration crushed by the world's immense and glacial indifference."

Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (1830–35). 34 × 44 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany In this work, the artist depicts a couple gazing longingly at nature, in "Old German" clothes, "scarcely different in tone or modelling from the deep dramas of nature around them".

That same year, Friedrich was appointed professor at the Academy in Dresden. He became more reclusive between 1830 and 1835, and dismissed the opinions of critics and the public by painting only for his family and friends—yet his art from this period can be considered among his finest. His well-known and especially Romantic painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog impressed Karl Friedrich Schinkel—later Prussia's most famous classicist architect—to the extent that he gave up painting in favour of architecture.

Friedrich's written commentary on aesthetics was limited to a collection of aphorisms set down in 1830, in which he explained the need for the artist to match natural observation with an introspective scrutiny of his own personality. His best-known remark advises the artist to "close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards." He rejected the overreaching portrayals of nature in its "totality", as found in the work of contemporary painters like Adrian Ludwig Richter (1803–1884) and Joseph Anton Koch (1768–1839).

The Abbey in the Oakwood (1808–10). 110.4 × 171 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany. This painting has been described as like "a scene from a horror movie, it [forebears] all the Gothic clichés of the late 18th and early 19th centuries".

Friedrich sketched memorial monuments and sculptures for mausoleums, reflecting his obsession with death and the afterlife; he created some of the funerary art in Dresden's cemeteries. Some of his paintings were lost in the fire that destroyed Munich's Glass Palace (1931) and in the 1945 bombing of Dresden.

Germanic folklore

Reflecting Friedrich's patriotism and resentment during the 1813 French occupation of the dominion of Pomerania, motifs from German folklore became increasingly prominent in his work. An anti-French German nationalist, Friedrich used motifs from his native landscape to celebrate Germanic culture, customs and mythology. He was impressed by the anti-Napoleonic poetry of Ernst Moritz Arndt and Theodor Körner, and the patriotic literature of Adam Müller and Heinrich von Kleist. Moved by the deaths of three friends killed in battle against France, as well as by Kleist's 1808 drama Die Hermannsschlacht, Friedrich undertook a number of paintings in which he intended to convey political symbols solely by means of the landscape—a first in the history of art.

In Old Heroes' Graves (1812), for example, a dilapidated monument inscribed "Arminius" invokes the Germanic chieftain, a symbol of nationalism, while the four tombs of fallen heroes are slightly ajar, freeing their spirits for eternity. Two French soldiers appear as small figures before a cave, lower and deep in a grotto surrounded by rock, as if farther from heaven. A second political painting, Fir Forest with the French Dragoon and the Raven (c. 1813), depicts a lost French soldier dwarfed by a dense forest, while on a tree stump a raven is perched—a prophet of doom, symbolizing the anticipated defeat of France.

Critical opinion

Until 1890, and especially after his friends had died out, Friedrich's work lay in near oblivion for decades. Yet, by 1890, the symbolism in his work began to chime with the artistic mood of the day, especially in central Europe. However, despite a renewed interest and an acknowledgment of his originality, his lack of regard for "painterly effect" and thinly rendered surfaces jarred with the theories of the time.

During the 1930s, Friedrich's work was used in the promotion of Nazi ideology, which attempted to fit the Romantic artist within the nationalistic Blut und Boden. It took decades for Friedrich's reputation to recover from this association with Nazism. His reliance on symbolism and the fact that his work fell outside the narrow definitions of modernism contributed to his fall from favour. In 1949, art historian Kenneth Clark wrote that Friedrich "worked in the frigid technique of his time, which could hardly inspire a school of modern painting", and suggested that the artist was trying to express in painting what is best left to poetry. Kenneth Clark's dismissal of Friedrich reflected the damage the artist's reputation sustained during the late 1930s.

"I am not so weak as to submit to the demands of the age when they go against my convictions. I spin a cocoon around myself; let others do the same. I shall leave it to time to show what will come of it: a brilliant butterfly or maggot."

—Caspar David Friedrich

Friedrich's reputation suffered further damage when his imagery was adopted by a number of Hollywood directors, such as Walt Disney, built on the work of such German cinema masters as Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau, within the horror and fantasy genres. His rehabilitation was slow, but enhanced through the writings of such critics and scholars as Werner Hofmann, Helmut Börsch-Supan and Singrid Hunz, who successfully rejected and rebutted the political associations ascribed to his work, and placed it within a purely art-historical context. By the 1970s he was again being exhibited in major galleries across the world.

However, by the end of the 1970s, Friedrich's reputation was restored, memories faded, taste changed, and he found favour with a new generation of critics, and art historians. Today, his international reputation is well established. He is a national icon in his native Germany, and highly regarded by art historians and art connoisseurs across the western world. He is generally viewed as a figure of great psychological complexity, and according to Vaughan, "a believer who struggled with doubt, a celebrator of beauty haunted by darkness. In the end, he transcends interpretation, reaching across cultures through the compelling appeal of his imagery. He has truly emerged as a butterfly—hopefully one that will never again disappear from our sight".

Influence

Some of Friedrich's contemporaries attributed the melancholy in his art to the tragedies of his youth. As an adult, his pale and withdrawn appearance reinforced the popular notion of the "taciturn man from the North". His letters, however, contain humour and self-irony, while the natural philosopher Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert wrote that Friedrich "was indeed a strange mixture of temperament, his moods ranging from the gravest seriousness to the gayest humour … But anyone who knew only this side of Friedrich's personality, namely his deep melancholic seriousness, only knew half the man. I have met few people who have such a gift for telling jokes and such a sense of fun as he did, providing that he was in the company of people he liked."

Ivan Shishkin, In the Wild North (1891). 161 x 118 cm. The Kiev Museum of Russian Art

Alongside other Romantic painters Friedrich helped position landscape painting as a major genre within Western art. Of his contemporaries, Friedrich's style most influenced the painting of Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857). Among later generations, Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) was strongly influenced by his work, and the substantial presence of Friedrich's works in Russian collections influenced many Russian painters, in particular Arkhip Kuindzhi (c. 1842–1910) and Ivan Shishkin (1832–1898). Friedrich's spirituality anticipates the painters of the American Hudson River School, the White Mountain artists, the Rocky Mountain School, the New England Luminists and American painters like Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917) and Ralph Blakelock (1847–1919).

Edvard Munch, The Lonely Ones (1899). Woodcut. Munch Museum, Oslo

At the turn of the century Friedrich was rediscovered by the Norwegian art historian Andreas Aubert (1851–1913), whose writing initiated modern Friedrich scholarship, and by the Symbolist painters, who valued his visionary and allegorical landscapes. The Norwegian Symbolist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) would have seen Friedrich's work during a visit to Berlin in the 1880s. Munch's 1899 print The Lonely Ones echoes Friedrich's Rückenfigur (back figure), although in Munch's work the focus has shifted away from the broad landscape and toward the sense of dislocation between the two melancholy figures in the foreground.

Friedrich's landscapes led Max Ernst (1891–1976) and other Surrealists to view him as a precursor to their movement. In 1934, the Belgian painter René Magritte (1898–1967) paid tribute in his work The Human Condition, which directly echoes motifs from Friedrich's art. He was featured in a 1939 article by Marie Landsberger in the Surrealist journal Minotaur. His work has been cited as an inspiration by other major 20th-century artists, including Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) and Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945), and has been singled out by Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), who, standing before Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, said "This was the source of Waiting for Godot, you know."

In his article The Abstract Sublime originally published in the February 1961 issue of ARTnews art historian Robert Rosenblum drew comparisons between the Romantic landscape paintings of both Friedrich and Turner with the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko. Rosenblum specifically describes Friedrich's 1809 painting The Monk by the Sea, Turner's The Evening Star and Rothko's 1954 Light, Earth and Blue, as revealing affinities of vision and feeling. He says Rothko, like Friedrich and Turner, places us on the threshold of those shapeless infinities discussed by the aestheticians of the Sublime. The tiny monk in the Friedrich and the fisher in the Turner establish a poignant contrast between the infinite vastness of a pantheistic God and the infinite smallness of His creatures. In the abstract language of Rothko, such literal detail-a bridge of empathy between the real spectator and the presentation of a transcendental landscape-is no longer necessary; we ourselves are the monk before the sea, standing silently and contemplatively before these huge and soundless pictures as if we were looking at a sunset or a moonlit night. Rosenblum also says: Like the mystic trinity of sky, water and earth that, in the Friedrich and Turner appears to emanate from one source, the floating horizontal tiers of veiled light in the Rothko seem to conceal a total, remote presence that we can only intuit and never fully grasp. These infinite glowing voids carry us beyond reason to the Sublime; we can only submit to them in an act of faith and let ourselves be absorbed into their radiant depths.

Selected works

Main article: List of works by Caspar David Friedrich

Bibliography

• Boele, Vincent and Foppema, Femke (eds.). Caspar David Friedrich & the German Romantic Landscape. Amsterdam: Hermitage Amsterdam, 2008. ISBN 9789040085680
• Boime, Albert. Art in an Age of Bonapartism, 1800–1815: A Social History of Modern Art, Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. ISBN 0-2260-6335-6.
• Börsch-Supan, Helmut (tr. Twohig, Sarah). Casper David Friedrich. New York: George Braziller, 1974. ISBN 0-8076-0747-9.
• Dahlenburg, Birgit & Carsten, Spitzer. "Major Depression and Stroke in Caspar David Friedrich". In Bougousslavsky, J. & Boller, F. (eds.), Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists. New York: Karger, c. 2005. ISBN 3-8055-7914-4.
• Griffiths, Antony and Carey, Francis; German Printmaking in the Age of Goethe, 1994, British Museum Press, ISBN 0714116599 .
• Guillaud, Maurice & Guillaud, Jacqueline. Casper David Friedrich, line and transparency. Exhibition catalogue, The Centre Culturel du Marais, Paris. Paris: Guillaud Editions, Rizzoli, 1984. ISBN 0-8478-5408-6.
• Hofmann, Werner. Caspar David Friedrich. Thames & Hudson: New York, 2000. ISBN 0-500-09295-8.
• Johnston, Catherine, et al. Baltic Light: Early Open-Air Painting in Denmark and North Germany. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-300-08166-9
• Murray, Christopher John. Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850. ISBN 1-5795-8423-3.
• Rewald, Sabine (ed.). The Romantic Vision of Caspar David Friedrich. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York, 1990. ISBN 0-87099-603-7.
• Rosenblum, Robert. Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko. New York, Harper & Row, Publishers; 1975, ISBN 0064300579
• Siegel, Linda. Caspar David Friedrich and the Age of German Romanticism. Branden Publishing Co, 1978. ISBN 0-8283-1659-7.
• Vaughan, William. "Caspar David Friedrich" in Romantic Landscape Painting in Dresden (exhibition catalog), Tate Gallery, London, 6 September – 16 October, 1972. ISBN 0-9008-7436-8.
• Vaughan, William.German Romantic Painting. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980. ISBN 0-300-02387-1.
• Vaughan, William. Friedrich. London: Phaidon Press, 2004. ISBN 0-7148-4060-2.
• Werner, Christoph. Um ewig einst zu leben. Caspar David Friedrich und Joseph Mallord William Turner. Weimar: Bertuch Verlag, 2006. ISBN 3-937601-34-1.
• Wolf, Norbert. Friedrich. Cologne: Taschen, 2003. ISBN 3-8228-2293-0.

External links

• Caspar David Friedrich Foundation
• Hermitage Museum Archive
• Web Gallery of Art - comprehensive collection of Friedrich's works
• Artcyclopedia - links to Friedrich's pictures from Image Archives, articles etc
• Biographical timeline, Hamburg Kunsthalle

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