Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich
On Saturday, February 8th, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened a new exhibition focusing on the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. Despite Friedrich’s importance and widespread popularity, the exhibition, entitled The Soul of Nature, is the first major museum show focusing on the artist in the United States. As such, the show serves as a broad introduction to the artist and his work to an American audience.
According to the curators, Friedrich saw nature as “a site of emotional and spiritual discovery.” Furthermore, his paintings “mark the rise of an intimate response to the natural world that endures today.” This made Friedrich a monumental figure of Romantic art by placing humanity in its proper context relating to the natural world. This is apparent even before he ventured into oil painting. The first gallery visitors walk into features sketches and ink wash drawings, which was his specialty before seriously taking up oil painting in 1808. His ink-wash drawings made in the first decade of the nineteenth century echo the later oil paintings he would execute. Eastern coast of Rügen with Shepherd, for example, seems incredibly similar to his later, more well-known oil painting Monk by the Sea (featured later in the exhibition): a lone figure placed not in the center of the work but towards the bottom to show the enormity of the landscape around them. Another common component in Friedrich’s work is showing faint traces of humanity even when no human figures are in the landscape: an abandoned boat left on a rocky shore, or the statue of a forest shrine, or a simple cross left on a hilltop.
The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich
His work encapsulates some of the core tenets of Romantic art, through the combination of landscape and spirituality. The exhibition poses these questions: “is nature ‘the book of God’, to be experienced and interpreted alongside biblical texts as a source of revelation? Or does divinity reside in the harmonious totality of nature?” Many of the paintings will feature metaphors for the road to finding faith. His painting Morning Mist in the Mountains is probably the best example of this. A snowy, pine-dotted mountain emerges from a fogbank, while a small, almost imperceivable cross sits at its summit. This is meant to represent the long, difficult path to understanding both the natural world and finding salvation. Contemplation was another theme of his work, which also carries its own religious and spiritual connotations. His paintings often featured figures or groups with their backs turned to the viewer as if we were viewing the scene along with them. This was a motif that other artists in his circle would adopt as well.
While most of the exhibition seemed mainly expository, there was one aspect on which the Met curators took a stance. In recent years, scholarship on Friedrich has pushed back against the previously common conception of him as a misanthropic loner, creating his work in isolation. The Met exhibition follows this newer scholastic current, showing how Friedrich maintained great friendships, took on pupils, and fraternized with patrons. The exhibition also contained work by some of his friends and students, particularly Jentzsch, Carus, and Dahl, to compare and contrast contemporary trends in subject and form. Furthermore, despite Friedrich’s focus on nature, that didn’t mean the human world around him did not feature in his paintings. A single work stood out to me when I visited the exhibition: The Chasseur in the Forest shows a lone French soldier in Friedrich’s typical fashion, small and towards the bottom of the canvas to show the vastness of the trees. However, the curators note that Friedrich exhibited the painting in Dresden in 1814, shortly after Napoleonic French troops left the city. It is said to represent the plight of Napoleon’s soldiers as they were leaving a country that had grown hostile to their presence. In the same gallery, Met curators also note how Friedrich featured oak trees in his other paintings, symbolizing German strength and identity. Some of the figures in his work wear very particular clothing that identifies them as young German men. In particular, medieval-style cloaks and black berets were popular among young liberal students in some of the German cities at the time, to the point that these articles of clothing had to be banned. Most notably, this clothing is seen in his Two Men Contemplating the Moon, the 1830 version of which is owned by the Met and was on display.
Two Men Contemplating the Moon by Caspar David Friedrich, 1830
Many of the paintings and other artworks were on loan from private collections and museums worldwide, mostly in Germany. These include the Hamburger Kunsthalle, which loaned Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which sent over Monk by the Sea. It’s surprising to learn that until now, no other major American museum has ever dedicated an exhibition to Caspar David Friedrich. However, I suppose it’s better late than never. The Soul of Nature allows American audiences (and the hordes of foreign tourists the Metropolitan Museum attracts) to fully understand the story of one of the giants of romanticism and, therefore, one of the great painters of nineteenth-century European art.