Caspar David Friedrich. Master of the tragic landscape (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) E-Book

Victoria Charles

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 168

Beschreibung

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), a prominent German painter of the 19th century, was a vital figure in the Romantic movement. His artwork is characterised by its poetic and melancholic essence, displaying a profound sense of spirituality and transcendence. In his paintings, he masterfully blended external nature depictions with deep inner symbolism. His often desolate landscapes and grand architecture evoke a yearning for peace, solitude, and spiritual elevation. The skilful utilisation of light and shadow in his composition amplifies the emotional resonance of Friedrich's art, imbuing it with an almost mystical quality. The artistic legacy of Caspar David Friedrich continues to influence contemporary landscape painting. His unparalleled aptitude for capturing the infinite within the finite renders his work a timeless representation of humanity's quest for transcendence and spiritual connection. This biography delves into the life and creations of this remarkable artist, celebrating his invaluable contributions to the evolution of Romantic painting.

Leseprobe

Victoria Charles

CASPAR DAVID

FRIEDRICH

Master of the tragic landscape

(5 September 1774-

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© 2023 Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

© 2023 Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA

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ISBN: 9781-63919-775-0

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Contents

Introduction

The Zeitgeist Of Caspar David Friedrich’s Era

Tracing Caspar David Friedrich’s Early Life And Formative Experience

The Artist

Contemporary Testimonies About Caspar David Friedrich

Exchange Of Letters

Aphorism

Index

Notes

The Painter Caspar David Friedrich, painted by Gerhard von Kügelen, c. 1808. Oil on canvas, 53,3 x 41,5 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany.

Introduction

“The divine is everywhere, even in the grain of sand.”

Caspar David Friedrich

Youth, vitality, generous commitment to art and unbridled passions - these are the characteristics of the Romantic era. Accompanied by rapture, error and exaggeration, Romanticism is an epoch truly rich in ideas, people and works.

The basic principles of Romanticism were first formulated in Germany at the end of the 18th century. Between 1770 and 1780, the literary and political protest movement of the ‘Sturm und Drang’ had already rebelled against Enlightenment society and the values it propagated. Friedrich von Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were also among those who supported the cult of nature and individualism as Jean-Jacques Rousseau[1] had already postulated in the mid-18th century. Despite this dismissive attitude, the rejection of classical conventions was not universal. While the ‘Sturm und Drang’ rejected classical traditions and literary conventions, its definition of beauty continued to be based on antiquity and referred to the harmony of forms and perfection.

Intellectual contributors to the journal “Athenäum”[2], such as the members of the Jena Circle, Novalis and Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, rejected classicism[3] altogether. Instead, they preferred mysticism, the expression of the irrational and the feeling of infinity to outdated values.

In painting, this tendency was expressed on the one hand in the “representation of the sublime” and on the other hand in the “mysticism of the landscape”, as expressed above all in the work of Caspar David Friedrichs.

Romanticism is permeated by the feeling of the infinity of space. The romantically minded artist no longer stands “opposite” this boundless nature, which is perceived as chaotic rather than cosmic, but rather feels at one with it. He is not the measure of all things, but outwardly a weak, small creature in the midst of incomprehensible powers. But as this small creature contemplates nature with feeling, it transforms into its object, belongs to it and responds to the Call of his soul. Nature becomes his world, it mourns with him, it smiles with him, its moonlit nights are his mourning, its blossoms on the shimmering slopes of the sky.

Everything that we recognise as essential traits of Romanticism: the individualism, the irrational, the mystical fusion of subject and object, the tendency to mix artistic means, the longing for the strange and distant, the strong feeling for the infinite and for the continuity of historical development are expressions of the national and cultural identity of German-speaking people. These traits are so strongly unified that they often remain incomprehensible to people of other cultures. It should be noted, however, that what is called Romanticism in France and Italy has no more than the name in common with Germanic Romanticism.”

Everything we recognise as essential features of Romanticism - the individualism, the irrational, the mystical fusion of subject and object, the tendency to mix artistic means, the longing for the strange and distant, the strong sense of the infinite and of the continuity of historical development - are characteristic traits of the national and cultural identity of the German-speaking peoples. They are so closely associated with it that they often remain incomprehensible in their uniformity to non-German speakers. Incidentally, what is called Romanticism in France and Italy has no more than the name in common with German Romanticism.

The coexistence of classicism and romanticism also meant the competition of two cultures for supremacy in Europe and in the world. In the end, Romanticism won. If we call Classicism the finale in the process of the survival of Greco-Roman antiquity and compare it to the alpenglow, we can rather see Romanticism as the dawn of a new day. Admittedly, Romanticism as a historical phenomenon has long since passed and its first, decisive phase was only of short duration, barely a human age. But all the events and developments that took place in this epoch and in the sphere of the Romantic spirit were of decisive importance for the recent development of our culture. Today, there is no science or art that has not been influenced by Romanticism. Philosophy, historical science, natural sciences, fine arts, literature and music all took a turn in the epoch of Romanticism and under the influence of masters of the Romantic spirit, which still determines their development today.

Chalk Cliffs at Ruegen, c. 1818. Oil on canvas, 21,4 x 27,1 cm. Kunst Museum Winterthur | Reinhart am Stadtgarten, Switzerland.

The Tetschen Altar, or The Cross in the Mountains, c. 1807. Oil on canvas, 115 x 110,5 cm. Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden, Germany.

The Zeitgeist of Caspar David Friedrich’s Era

In the Christmas days of 1808, a small circle of art lovers in Dresden experienced a special surprise. They made a pilgrimage to the flat of the peculiar painter Caspar David Friedrich to view the so-called altarpiece exhibited there. In the artist’s small, white-painted room, a window had been covered to dim the bright light and create a pleasant twilight. On a table covered with a black blanket, in a carved gilded frame, stood the new painting that caused a sensation. A peculiar devotion and mood emanated from this oil painting, which was intended as an altar for the house chapel of Tetschen Castle[4] in Bohemia.

The sculptor Kühn[5], who was a friend of the painter, had carved the frame according to Friedrich’s drawing, on which Christian symbols made the purpose of the solemn picture clear. The year before, Friedrich had already shown an unfinished sepia drawing at the exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, which, like the altarpiece, showed a lonely cross on a mountain, surrounded by high clouds. Although this work received great acclaim, there was also fierce criticism, which led some artists to exhibit their works only in their own studios. The young Countess Thun, who was enthusiastic about this drawing, expressed her wish to have a similar altarpiece for the new house chapel of her castle. After some hesitation, the artist agreed to paint the altarpiece and to fit it into an appropriate frame that would fit the space of her chapel.

At the urgent request of friends, the first major painting by the idiosyncratic artist Friedrich was now exhibited in his studio. The excitement the work aroused was understandable, for it broke with all conventional traditions and ideas by combining a landscape painting with an altar. Nevertheless, the painting was admired by many for its inspirational effect, even though art connoisseurs recognised that Frederick had not yet reached the peak of his technical skills, having only recently switched from sepia to oil painting.

That is why the fierce and viciously worded attack by the chamberlain von Ramdohr in the Zeitschrift für die elegante Welt[6] was all the more surprising. It seemed as if he wanted to attack with his attack not only the new altarpiece, but also the spirit of Romanticism and the religious as well as artistic being in general. It was as if he wanted to declare war on the Romantic painters, poets and thinkers who had just taken intellectual Dresden by storm, and came from the camp of the precocious and beautiful-minded classicists.

Greifswald in Moonlight, 1817. Oil on canvas, 30,5 x 22,5 cm. The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway.

How the painters Hartmann and von Kügelgen[7], friends of the “Phöbus Circle”[8], repelled the attack, how the clever library secretary Semler sought to mediate, and how the clever, loquacious Hofrat Böttiger had to mediate, will not be discussed here. What is important for us, however, is to recognise from these literary disputes what was new and unfamiliar about this Romantic landscape art and why it was Friedrich in particular who became the leader and champion of this Romantic art. In Dresden, an art-friendly city, the North German school of Romanticism had prevailed over the Franconian and Saxon classicists.

The aim here, then, is to understand the significance of Romantic landscape art and why it was so important to the period. Frederick was recognised as the champion and leader of this movement and his works provoked fierce debate and controversy.

Today we have a clear overview of the lineage and intellectual history of the great movement associated with the fateful and often misunderstood name “Romanticism”. We now know why and where the new forces of this epoch came from. If Copenhagen was the art academy that attracted young artists from Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, the Hanseatic cities, Sweden and Norway, at the turn of the century Dresden, rich in art and a lover of art, became the rallying point of Nordic Romanticism. Here the painters, who were supported by Napoleon, found a gallery and a body of artists, as well as enlightened international sociability and magnificent nature. Because of these conditions, Dresden soon became the meeting place of artistic youth after Jena and Berlin.

In the immediate vicinity of the theatre of war, Dresden was - as Gentz said - “an island in a raging ocean” from which correspondence with Berlin and Vienna could flow unhindered, even in turbulent times. Thinkers, poets, painters, musicians and politicians met here in the gallery or in the witty evening circles of the friendly houses. There was a receptive audience for painting, music, poetry, philosophy and religion that attended the Academy’s exhibitions, the theatre, the balls and tea parties and had money, stationery and publications to spend. It was here that the omniscient Böttiger led tours of antiquity by torchlight and delivered his difficult-to-understand lectures. The witty philosopher Krause[9] and the idiosyncratic poet Watzdorf[10] frequented here. The young, witty Adam Müller from Berlin, philosopher, politician and journalist, gave his epoch-making lectures on German science and literature in the “Hotel de Pologne” in 1806, then on dramatic art and in the winter of 1807/08 on the idea of beauty, together with the natural philosopher Schubert[11], who stayed with Friedrich’s friends, the Kügelgens. Supported by Academy professor Hartmann, Müller was able to publish the literary journal with his enthusiastic friend Heinrich von Kleist[12] and Adam Heinrich Müller[13], who secretly and openly took up the fight against Franconian-Swabian classicism. Here the painter Otto Runge[14], who came from Pomerania, found inspiration and understanding for the fine, new, allegorical and symbolic art, especially with Tieck[15], his equal helper and friend. Things were fermenting here, and against all odds, the new life and the new spirit were ‘imparted’.

Oak Tree in the Snow, Caspar David Friedrich, 1829. Oil on canvas, 71 x 48 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany.

Mountain Landscape with Rainbow, 1809-1810. Oil on canvas, 70 x 102 cm. Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany.

Here the new landscape painting, prepared by Runge’s symbolic theory of form and colour, was able to achieve its first victory and thus its recognition. But what was new and exciting about Frederick’s landscape altarpiece? Basil von Ramdohr[16] not only recognised a new religious mysticism in the picture and frame - as it was to be found in some aesthetic circles in Dresden - but also criticised serious artistic errors. All academic rules of perspective were neglected. A new economy of artistic means, an unconventional closeness to nature, bold cropping and unusual colouring were tried out, but these contradicted the art of the classical schools and the understanding of art of the classicists. This New German naturalism in the treatment of the parts and details as well as the peculiar closeness to the incidental and the Christian-religious symbolism had to be repugnant to the friend of the ideal, classical and composed landscape art.

And now this landscape painting wanted to “creep into the churches and crawl onto the altars“. The fact that a new spirit creates new forms, that in a religious work of art it is not matter but spirit that decides on value and effect, that a landscape, as in nature, so also in art, can reveal the divine, the eternal, had not yet occurred to the grudging critic.

Ramdohr invoked Ruysdael[17], to whom Goethe had dedicated his excellent essay “Ruysdael as Poet” in 1816, and referred to the so-called Jewish cemetery in the gallery. However, he did not notice that it was precisely in Ruysdael that the new Symbolism had found its best ancestor and witness. For in the classicist camp of Weimar art lovers, too, that new conception of nature had awakened which interpreted the idea “for what is within is without” physiognomically and morphologically as a God-nature developed and shaped in all forms.

Although Goethe found the Christian doctrine of faith sought by these two artists alien, he nevertheless praised, acquired and commented on the works of Runge and Friedrich. This shows how close he was to Romanticism, despite all its contradictions. It was precisely in them that he found the new view of nature, the knowledge and love of nature that were the prerequisites for his scientific studies. It was therefore obvious that he tried to win Runge over for his theory of colours and Friedrich for his theory of clouds, and even to engage the two artists as witnesses and helpers for his scientific views.

Rocky Landscape in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, c. 1822. Oil on canvas, 94 x 74 cm. Belvedere, Wien, Österreich.

Landscape with Oak Trees and a Hunter, 1811. Oil on canvas, 32 x 44,5 cm. Kunst Museum Winterthur, Reinhart am Stadtgarten, Winterthur, Germany. (Formerly Museum Oskar Reinhart).

In this context, it was important to show that this new landscape art had also been conceived in other ways in Weimar. In a clever essay, Fernow[18] already distinguished the different genres of landscape painting as natural, aesthetic and poetic, but without recognising the anthropomorphic, psychographic and symbolic character of this new language of signs. Form had to become spirit again before spirit could take shape again. The sculpture had to acquire colour, the human being had to become the universe, the body had to become the landscape, the word had to become music. Only in this way could the stone, the cloud, the flower and the human being find their original living language again and the harmonious whole regain its connection with the universe, the infinite and the divine. This religious world feeling was to replace the lost, often longed-for religion of Europe. It was the revealed mythology of ‘God-nature’. Now we can guess how all this benefited painting and how everything pushed towards the landscape, which until then had been dedicated to man, his body and his history, but not to his soul and its essence.

Through the new world view, the content had acquired a new meaning and the form had found a new spirit. In the chaos of the worlds of experience and effect, a new world of meaning had formed and colour as the actual mystical phenomenon now also had to gain a new meaning. The symbolic was again legible in all forms and colours and Tischbein’s apples[19] indicated the different stages of life just as Friedrich’s ships did. One was allowed to read the great book of God again after having only looked at it for so long. In this way, art also became a great pictorial script of the divine.

In reverence for nature, one had to trace the great script with sharp pencil and brush in order to be able to use its organic forms as symbolic formulae of human life, soul and feeling. The classical, heroic and unnatural forms were unsuitable for a landscape of the soul and for an art that wanted to capture life like a fleeing moon. For this art strove to depict “a certain mood of spiritual life in imitation of a corresponding mood of natural life”.

City at Moonrise, 1817. Oil on canvas, 45 x 33 cm. Collection Kunst Museum Winterthur.

Solitary Tree, 1822. Oil on canvas, 71 x 55 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.

The Cemetery Entrance, c. 1825. Oil on canvas, 143 x 110 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Dresden, Germany.

If one follows what the writings of the Romantic art theorists and artists - such as Tieck, Runge, Müller, Rühle, von Lilienstern, Kleist, Semler, Friedrich and Carus[20] - say is the essence of the new landscape painting, one understands that the natural form could only be the vehicle of an idea, as it was above all in the Gothic and Baroque periods. It was the embodiment of a spirit, the captured close-up image of an infinite vision. The laws of nature were only parables of a knowledge that recognised the divine in a grain of sand, in a reed, in a little snow-covered tree or in a stranded ship.

“In Friedrich’s paintings, the rapt and self-forgetful figures also became embodiments of this unity and feeling, sound figures of the theme and colourful doubles of the artist. They laid their sighing, hoping and trusting melancholically and monologically in delicate shades of colour. Religion and patriotism, love and foreboding of death could thus be romanticised through seemingly familiar images of nature and reveal that indeterminate, timeless, universal quality - that ‘inkling of the infinite’ in views.

Through the search for a new language of form and colour, it was possible to abandon the typology of forms of meaning in all areas of art. Finally, a landscape painting could be transformed into an altar that symbolically interpreted the Christian doctrine of redemption through the phenomena of nature.

This also explains why, when Runge was commissioned by Quistorp in the winter of 1806/07 to paint an altar with the theme of Peter on the Sea for the chapel of the Kosegarten in Vitte, he set it in a full moon landscape near Rügen. Thus, this altar could also be called a landscape, similar to the famous panel by Konrad Witz[21], which can be seen again today in the Geneva Museum. We will return to these problems of the religious landscape when we consider the life of Frederick.

Sea of Ice / Ship in the Polar Sea, c. 1723. Oil on canvas, 97 x 127 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany.

Tracing Caspar David Friedrich’s Early Life and Formative Experience

Caspar David Friedrich was born on 5 September 1774 in Greifswald on the Baltic Sea in what was then Swedish Pomerania. His father, Adolf Gottlieb Friedrich, was a candle maker and soap boiler and raised his son in the strict Lutheran, pietistic faith. Caspar David Friedrich grew up in his parents’ house at Lange Straße 28, which still exists today. The Friedrichs originally came from Silesia and were probably an old noble family of counts who emigrated in the 18th century because of their faith. However, the noble ancestry could not be proven with certainty. Caspar David Friedrich, like his friend Philipp Otto Runge, was a Pomeranian.