A new show opening in February at the Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrates (if a year late) the 250th anniversary of the birth of Caspar David Friedrich in 1774. The show originated (punctually) at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and it offers American art lovers some seventy-five works by the German master, as well as an assortment of works by predecessors, contemporaries, and followers, down to the present age.
Friedrich occupies an ambiguous place in the history of art. Like J. M. W. Turner (who was born half a year later) he came of age near the end of the ancien régime, when the tradition of the Old Masters was dying out, but still had considerable vigor left in it. Although Friedrich is usually characterized as a leader of the romantic movement—justifiably from a thematic perspective—his training and technique, in both his paintings and drawings, emerged from the tradition of the Old Masters. He was almost exclusively a landscape artist, as was Turner, and like this British contemporary, he projected onto the external world, across oceans and mountain ranges, the most private stirrings of his soul. But how instructively different are these two artists, despite certain similarities?
For all his cantankerousness, Turner appears to have been an ebulliently happy spirit. Ultimately his art always has to do with the weather: often that weather is slightly misty, but his mists are the mists of spring, and the sun pierces them in ways that are unfailingly enchanting. Even the rain is hopeful and exhilarating in Turner. As importantly, his orientation is toward the south, toward Italy and Greece, in all their freedom and openness. This explains his fealty to that most classical of landscape painters, Claude Lorrain.
In Friedrich, by contrast, the external world is not without its enchantments and sublimities, but it is a world of secrets and menace. Although the artist spent most of his life in Dresden, he received important training in Denmark, and the precision of his pencil and palette underscores those roots. More importantly, he is oriented toward the north, even toward the polar regions. The weather that defines him is most often rain and snow: in his famous Sea of Ice, the ragged outcroppings of polar ice claim as their victim the listing, shattered wreckage of a ship.
Friedrich’s is a twilit world, shy of sunlight and drawn irresistibly toward night. Although his Monk by the Sea is comparable in some respects to Turner’s landscapes, Friedrich reveals whole layers of spiritual oddity that have no correlate in the robust vitalism of Turner.
Perhaps the most emblematic of Friedrich’s works is Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, in which a solitary figure, looking dapper with his waistcoat and walking stick, peers down as though from a mountaintop into a valley. There is sublimity here, as in Turner: but if Turner’s sublimity is one of joyous union with the cosmos, Friedrich’s figure stands above nature in a state of heroic alienation, trying to make sense of it all.
Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature • Metropolitan Museum of Art • February 8 to May 11 • metmuseum.org
