Everything about Caspar David Friedrich totally explained
Caspar David Friedrich (
September 5,
1774 –
May 7,
1840) was a
landscape painter of the nineteenth-century
German Romantic movement, of which he's now considered the most important painter. A painter and draughtsman, Friedrich is best known for his later
allegorical landscapes, which feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees, and
Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey the spiritual experiences of life.
Friedrich was born in
Greifswald in northern Germany in 1774. He studied in Copenhagen until 1798 before settling in
Dresden. He came of age during a period when, across Europe, a growing disillusionment with an over-materialistic society led to a new appreciation for spiritualism. This was often expressed through a reevaluation of the natural world, as artists such as Friedrich,
J. M. W. Turner and
John Constable sought to depict nature as a "divine creation, to be set against the artifice of human civilization".
Although Friedrich was renowned during his lifetime, his work fell from favour during the second half of the nineteenth century. As Germany moved towards modernisation, a new urgency was brought to its art, and Friedrich's contemplative depictions of stillness were seen as the products of a bygone age. His rediscovery began in 1906 when an exhibition of 32 of his paintings and sculptures was held in Berlin. During the 1920s his work was appreciated by the
Expressionists, and in the 1930s and 1940s, the
Surrealists and
Existentialists frequently drew on his work. Today he's seen as an icon of the German Romantic movement, and a painter of international importance.
Life
Early years
Caspar David Friedrich was born the sixth of ten children in Greifswald,
Hither Pomerania, a town in
Northern Germany (then part of
Sweden) on the
Baltic Sea. He grew up under the strict
Lutheran creed of his father Adolf Gottlieb, a prosperous candle-maker and soap boiler. At the age of thirteen, Caspar David witnessed his brother, Johann Christoffer, fall through the ice of a frozen lake and drown. Some accounts suggest that Johann Christoffer succumbed while trying to rescue Caspar David, who was also in danger on the ice. His sister Elisabeth died in 1782, while a second sister, Maria, succumbed to
typhus in 1791.
Some of Friedrich's contemporaries attributed the melancholy in his art to these childhood events, yet it's as likely that Friedrich's personality was naturally so inclined. As an adult, the pale and withdrawn Friedrich reinforced the popular notion of the "taciturn man from the North". His letters, however, always contained humour and self-irony. In his autobiography, the natural philosopher
Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert wrote of Friedrich, "He 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've 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."
In 1790, Friedrich began to study art with Johann Gottfried Quistorp at the
University of Greifswald, and literature and aesthetics with the
Swedish professor
Thomas Thorild. Thorild was interested in the contemporary English aesthetic, and taught Friedrich to distinguish between the spiritual 'inner eye' and the less favourable physical 'outer eye'. Friedrich entered the prestigious
Academy of Copenhagen in 1794 where 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 by then waining neo-classical form. Mood was paramount, and influence was drawn from such sources as the Icelandic legend of
Edda and
Ossian, and Nordic folklore. A talented student, Friedrich began his education at the academy by making copies of casts from antique sculptures, before proceeding to drawing from life. He was keenly interested in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, to which he'd access at Copenhagen's
Royal Picture Gallery.
In 1798 he settled permanently in
Dresden. He often drew works, mainly naturalistic and topographical, with
India ink,
watercolor and
sepia ink. It is unclear when he finally took up
oil painting, but it was probably after the age of thirty. Landscapes were his preferred subject, inspired by frequent trips, beginning in 1801, to the Baltic coast,
Bohemia, the
Riesen Mountains 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. The paintings of this time were modeled on sketches and studies of scenic spots, like the cliffs on
Rügen, and the surroundings of Dresden or
Elbe. The studies themselves were made almost exclusively in pencil, and provided topographical information; the subtle atmospheric effects characteristic of Friedrich's maturity were rendered from memory. These effects would eventually be most concerned with the depiction of light, of the illumination of sun and moon on clouds and water, optical phenomena specific to the Baltic coast and that had never before been painted.
Maturity
Friedrich's first major painting came at the age of 34.
The Cross in the Mountains, now known as the
The Tetschen Altar (
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), was an
altarpiece panel exhibited in 1808. The work met with controversy, but it was his first painting to gain wide appraisal; for the first time in Christian art, a pure landscape was the panel of an altarpiece. It depicts the crucified Christ in profile at the top of a mountain, alone, surrounded by nature. The cross rises highest in the composition, but is viewed obliquely and at a distance. The mountain symbolizes an immovable faith, while the fir trees represent hope. The artist and 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". Rahmdohr was fundamentally asking whether a pure landscape painting could convey an explicit meaning. That the sun is sinking suggests that the time when God reveals himself directly to man is past. Friedrich's extended interpretation of his own work was the first and last of its kind.
His recognition as an artist began with an 1805 prize at a Weimar competition. In 1810, Friedrich was elected a member of the
Berlin Academy after the purchase of two of his paintings by the Prussian
Crown Prince. Six years later he was elected a member of the Dresden Academy, a position which carried an annual stipend of 150
thalers.
On
21 January,
1818, Friedrich, then 44, married Caroline Bommer. Bommer was twenty-five years old, the daughter of a dyer from Dresden, and a gentle, unassuming woman.
Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, painted after his honeymoon, is a good example of this development.
The artist found support from two sources in Russia. The Grand Duke
Nikolai Pavlovich visited Friedrich's studio in 1820, returning to
Saint Petersburg with paintings for his wife
Alexandra Feodorovna. The poet
Vasily Zhukovsky, tutor of heir to the throne
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, another leading German painter of the Romantic period, and gained the admiration of the poet
Goethe. He was also a friend of
Georg Friedrich Kersting, who painted him at work in his unadorned studio, and the
Norwegian painter
Johann Christian Dahl. 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 attended to 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 didn't see Friedrich's faithful and conscientious study of nature in everything he represented".
Expansive skies, storms, mist, forests, ruins, and crosses bearing witness to the presence of God are frequent elements in Friedrich's landscapes. Symbols of death occur in boats that move away from shore, a
Charon motif, and in the
poplar tree. Death is referenced more directly in paintings like
The Abbey in the Oakwood, in which monks carry a coffin past an open grave, toward a cross, through the portal of a church in ruins.
The bare
oak trees are a recurring element of Friedrich's paintings, symbolizing the "pagan aspect" of 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. In
The Abbey in the Oakwood, then, 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 dawns and dusks constituting prominent themes of his landscapes, Friedrich's own later years were characterized by a growing pessimism. This is reflected in his work, which becomes darker, showing a fearsome monumentalism.
The Wreck of Hope, also known as
The Polar Sea or
Sea of Ice, perhaps summarizes Friedrich's ideas and aims at this point, though in such a radical way that the painting wasn't well received. Painted in 1824, it depicted a grim subject, a shipwreck in the
Arctic Ocean. That same year Friedrich was appointed professor at the Academy in Dresden. Between 1830 and 1835 he became more reclusive, and he dismissed the opinions of critics and the public by only painting 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) so much that he gave up painting and took up
architecture.
Friedrich's written commentary on aesthetics was limited to a collection of
aphorisms written in 1830, in which he explains 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've seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards." Eschewing overreaching portrayals of nature in its "totality", as found in the work of contemporary painters like
Ludwig Richter and
Joseph Anton Koch, Friedrich observed:
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."
Underscoring Friedrich's patriotism during the French occupation of
Pomerania, references to
German folklore became increasingly prominent in his work. An anti-French nationalist, Friedrich also used the German landscape to celebrate the 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 (Kleist was the first member of the Romantic movement to discuss Friedrich in print). Inspired by the deaths of three friends who had died in battle against France, and 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, 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 further 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.
Friedrich sketched memorial monuments and sculptures for
mausoleums, reflecting his obsession with death and the afterlife. Some of the funereal art in Dresden's cemeteries is his. Some of his paintings were lost in the fire that destroyed
Munich's
Glass Palace (1931) and in the
bombing of Dresden in World War II.
Legacy
Alongside other Romantic painters Friedrich helped position landscape painting as major genre within
Western art. Friedrich's style influenced the painting of Dahl, but whether the successors to his painting style achieved his mastery and depth is debated.
Arnold Böcklin was strongly influenced by his work, and perhaps as well the painters of the American
Hudson River School, the
Rocky Mountain School, the
New England Luminists and American painters like
Albert Pinkham Ryder and
Ralph Blakelock. He has been advocated by artists such as
David Hockney, and is represented in many major international collections, although most of his work remains in Germany.
Citations
Further Information
Get more info on 'Caspar David Friedrich'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://caspar_david_friedrich.totallyexplained.com">Caspar David Friedrich Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
