A viewer seeing Caspar David Friedrich’s work for the first time may be surprised by the easy-going delicacy and directness of his painter’s touch and by the way he draws. Now the subject, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of his first full retrospective in the United States, this early-nineteenth-century artist’s very name can conjure up something quite different. Although he has been little seen in this country (very few of his works are outside his native Germany), Friedrich’s pictures are widely associated with a hushed, expectant, almost religious rapport with the natural world. He is a painter-poet of immanence, of moments and moods pregnant with larger meanings. In paintings that were less representations of specific places than landscapes and scenes that he devised on his own, almost as if they were stage sets, he might show massive oaks set among the ruins of a church at a winter sunset, or people sitting on rocks by the sea at night, looking at the moon casting light on the water below. In his hands, the tips of pine trees, the spires of churches, and the masts of sailing ships are ethereally thin and pointy. They rise, it can seem, heavenward.
Yet one of the wonders of Friedrich’s art is the way the atmosphere he creates has so little that is obviously reverential, portentous, or, on the other hand, celebratory about it. The spirit of his work is instead an original mixture of something precise — adamantly so at times — yet also tender and matter of fact. There is a pleasing plainness to his artistry. His hand does not make us wonder how he did it, as we might wonder when looking at the spumy maelstroms of his esteemed contemporary Turner. Even when his views are nighttime scenes and appropriately dark, Friedrich’s pictures dispense with the blanketing brown and gold tones that can make many landscapes leaden and glossy, whether they are by Claude or Ruisdael — the seventeenth-century progenitors of landscape painting — or even by Constable, another one of Friedrich’s significant contemporaries. Next to the work of Turner or Constable (or of other painters of his time such as Géricault or Delacroix), Friedrich is a master who does not seem old-masterish.
Bushes in the Snow, for instance, which is one of the loveliest works in the Met’s show, seems to jump right out of its historical period, the 1820s. This small canvas (it measures twelve by ten inches) presents a stand of lithe tree trunks and countless leafless branches, many touched with snow and placed on a snowy ground against the blue-gray sky of a winter’s day. The image is hardly momentous, and yet, subtly centered and cradled by the surrounding blue-gray, the trees have the presence of a memento, a bouquet, or a heraldic emblem. But what makes the work fresh may be the matte and untextured way Friedrich has painted the work. It has, to its benefit, the quiet boldness of a cartoon.
As the writing in the catalogue accompanying the Met’s exhibition suggests, Friedrich’s is a renown that did not come overnight. (The thrust of the show is, in effect, “Let’s not equivocate any longer. He is a giant.”) He was long forgotten after his death in 1840, at sixty-six, and he only started to be widely seen in the 1930s, in Germany. That his images of communions with nature atop mountains or in dark forests were taken by the Nazis as portrayals of the Teutonic spirit–Hitler decorated the Reich Chancellery with Friedrich’s paintings at one point–did not make him beguiling to viewers in other countries. In Kenneth Clark’s Landscape Into Art, from 1947, with its lengthy appreciations of Turner, Constable, Corot, Cézanne, and other expected players, Friedrich is mentioned once in passing, and not warmly. Decades later, with the painter now of increasing interest to art historians and museum curators outside Germany, the New York Times could label his admirers a “cult.”
Unfortunate as well was that some of the early appreciations of his work in English, such as Helmut Börsch-Supan’s Caspar David Friedrich, in 1974, a handsome volume with tipped-in plates, saw his work in largely symbolic and Christian terms. There hardly seems to be a rock or a pine tree, in these accounts, that does not carry some transcendent weight. One can go crazy reading, in Börsch-Supan’s book, “The ship pressing on towards the shore signified the life that is approaching death… The rock is a symbol of faith. The hope of resurrection is symbolized by the anchor. The poles lying in front of the cross … ” and so on.
Friedrich himself, a number of whose early pictures include Christian crosses set atop mountains or processions of monks, laid the groundwork for looking at his art this way. He stemmed from a family background of North German, Lutheran piety, and there appears to have been a forbidding reserve about him as a person. He was known for his abstemious ways, his monkish need for solitude, and his endless quest for the moods and the colors of the natural world. His studio home in Dresden was famously bare of amenities.
Yet in remarks here and there in his letters or in accounts of him, we encounter someone who might see two sides of an issue. Writing to a young artist about a picture he was doing for her friend, he could say, “The cross is erected on the bare seashore; to some a symbol of consolation, to others simply a cross.” On another occasion, begging off from a friend’s hope that the two of them could travel together, he remarked, “Once I happened to spend a whole week in the Uttewalder Grund among the cliffs and fir trees, and in all that time I didn’t meet a single soul. True, I wouldn’t recommend such a method to anyone, and even for me it was too much.” And in notes on painting made around 1830, he wrote, confoundingly, “I look at pictures only in order to enjoy them.”
Friedrich’s pliancy in his thinking is echoed in his work. His taste for having a religious spirit or even religious appurtenances in his pictures clearly diminished over the years. More importantly, in following the development of his art, and encountering his feeling for that stand of leafless trees in the snow–or for the vibrant green with which he painted fields outside Dresden, or for the way his view of a body of water near the city suggests a still from a movie shot in cinemascope — viewers can easily forget that any theology might be at stake.
Friedrich was limber, too, in the kinds of pictures he wanted to make. Many of his paintings, like Bushes in the Snow, are small in size, and a number of them, set at sunset or on a moonlit night, have an inviting glow. Monk by the Sea, however, a stand-out at the exhibition, shows a painter of world-size ambition — and one presenting to his audience the opposite of a glowing or private experience. Noticed and talked about when it was first exhibited in 1810, when Friedrich was thirty-six, this picture has been much reproduced. It is now being exhibited in the States for the first time. Approaching it, I heard someone say “This is what I came to see.” I doubt that he was disappointed.
Nearly four feet high and over six feet across, Monk by the Sea is almost more like a living organism than an artwork. It is crucial that the “monk” is quite small. His tiny presence, combined with the near-emptiness of the white-gray stretch of land he walks on — and of the glinting, harsh blues of the sea and sky beyond and above him — is what makes the picture seem more genuinely vast and enveloping of viewers than many paintings, abstract or representational, that are bigger than it in square feet. The sky is clearing toward the top of the view, but that does not mitigate the picture’s overall feeling of lightlessness. Are we looking at daytime or nighttime? It could be both, and that is part of what makes the picture unnerving, even frightening. The late Robert Rosenblum, who did more than anyone to open up Friedrich’s art for English-speaking audiences, wrote that the painter, in one image or another, often leaves us at the “very edge of the natural world.” With Monk by the Sea, we can feel we are at the edge of an awaiting void.
A perhaps even better known (or more reproduced) Friedrich also made it to New York for the first time. It is Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, a picture of a man, cane in hand, who has come to the top of some rocks and, his back to us, faces a swirling realm of hills, boulders, mountains, clouds, and mist. This painting of a figure clad entirely in dark green, taking in the natural world in all its stirring vastness, presents an image many viewers will probably have seen in one reproduction or another — it was born to be the jacket art for books by Nietzsche or records by Schubert — without knowing that it is by Friedrich. The image presents a fine ambiguity. It might be showing how the natural world, in all its rocky and fleecy beauty, stops us in our tracks. Or, such is the effect of the large, dark, advancing figure, its subject might be dominance, or self-assertion, in itself. Both avenues of interpretation, however, seem obvious and overstated. Friedrich is for once heavy-handed. This happens for a formal reason. Our “wanderer” is too big. Unlike the figure in Monk by the Sea, he has not been made a cohesive part of the landscape. He comes across more like a flat cutout pasted onto a screen of mountains and mist.
The issue of people in Friedrich’s pictures–men and women almost always seen from their back — is a vital aspect of his work. It should be said, however, that, at least in the writing about the painter I have read in English, the topic barely exists. Pictures with or without onlookers are generally treated in similar terms. Yet his paintings with people are probably the works that have made the more lasting impressions on viewers. Friedrich’s way of saying that we look at the world to find the ineffable is more tangible when he includes the lookers themselves. How this landscape painter came to make figures an integral part of his imagery is one of his achievements as an artist.
Friedrich’s interest in people and in the human figure was there from the beginning. It is not so evident at the Met’s exhibition, but the artist in his early years could be an acute portraitist. He left behind a handful of striking self-portraits (at different ages) and portraits of people. Some of the more vivid are of his father, who appears as not merely a carefully rendered face but, rather, a person with a temperament–a not so friendly one. In his son’s early work, people, seen on mountainsides or standing in the woods, are little more than part of the scenery. But with his monk by the sea and his wanderer in the mountains, which he did in his late thirties and early forties, when he was already a fully mature artist, Friedrich was clearly experimenting with having figures be necessary and featured parts of the story. One issue he faced was size. How small or big were they to be? What impact were they to have?
It seems fair to say that with his marriage to Caroline Bommer in 1818 — a surprise to everyone, maybe even to the artist — Friedrich found a way, or perhaps he now felt the need, to make figures an organic part of the scene. Some of his richest and most engaging pictures are from the time of his early married years, and their strength has much to do with the natural and unforced way the figures, especially a woman with her hair up in a bun, who might be Caroline, are seen from behind. Friedrich’s spirit as a person seems to have changed at the time. His pictures appear more welcoming of the everyday world we all live in. It can be felt in Woman at a Window, a charming small picture (it is in the exhibition) which shows a woman with her back to us, her body leaning slightly to her left as she takes in the view outside. The painting is unusual for Friedrich in being an interior, and it is another surprise to see him catching the slight tilt of her head.
It is unfortunate that two even finer pictures from these years, Chalk Cliffs at Rügen, a scene in which people look out at white cliffs going down to the sea, and On the Sailboat, a painting of a man and woman sitting together on the prow of a boat as it heads to a distant shore, are not in the Met’s exhibition. (Both have been seen in the museum in prior shows.) They take Friedrich’s predilection for figures seen from the back into new spheres. The people in Chalk Cliffs are tourists, not monks or wanderers, and the couple in the boat, whose knees touch and are holding hands, are lovers. We see something amazing, and Friedrich at his most pliant: an artist taking an idea–the figure seen from behind–and using it in a way that he probably never imagined it would or even could be used when he conceived it.
Friedrich lived through tremendous difficulties in his last years. He was a renowned and influential figure in his middle age, but he lived to see his work superseded by a taste for a more overtly religious content in pictures and a more finished, highly detailed realism. He was severely set back as well by a stroke, and ultimately he could no longer paint. But before handling oil paint became too much for him, he made some canvases, marked by the use of delicate, almost decorative colors in the sky, that present a luxuriant note that was new in his work. One of them, The Stages of Life, fortunately made it to New York. Its title alerts us to its symbolical nature, and the symbolically-minded will note that, in this scene set on a quiet inlet as evening approaches, five people of different ages have come together, and heading towards them on the water are five sailboats — harbingers of life coming towards its end, the reasoning goes.
Our characters include children, a man and woman who might be parents, and someone with a cane, who might be a grandfather and could be thinking of the nearby grave that was probably freshly dug. But the picture doesn’t quite leave us with an outline of mortality. What we carry away is its softly glowing end-of-day light and the almost perfumed quality of its pale lavender, yellow, gray, and green colors. Most extraordinary is the work’s flowing yet complex composition. The people, in the shapes of their bodies, and the ships, in their respective shapes, rhythmically play off each other in ways that form an ever-shifting treat for one’s eyes.
A certain irony suffuses our understanding of Friedrich’s work. His ostensible subject was thinking about the future, or the sense we carry of what waits beyond. As Robert Rosenblum put it, Friedrich showed the “experience of having arrived at the last outpost of the terrestrial world, beyond which there are only spiritual means of transportation.” But whether he was looking at a little stand of trees in the snow or a family gathering by an inlet in the early evening, he was also, and in a way like no other, one of the great painters of the here and now.