Caspar David Friedrich. Landscape Painting to Another Dimension
It is 250 years since the birth of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), one of the great German painters of Romanticism. On the occasion of his anniversary, Germany is preparing various tributes, the most important being that of the Alte Nationalgalerie Museum in Berlin, which will open on 19 April: “Caspar David Friedrich. Infinite Landscapes”. It will be an important exhibition featuring 60 paintings and 50 drawings by the paradigmatic painter of German Romanticism, including his most iconic works. It was in Germany that European Romanticism had its origin through its literature, its painting and its music, exalting feeling above the preponderance of Enlightenment reason.
It is 250 years since the birth of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), one of the great German painters of Romanticism. On the occasion of his anniversary, Germany is preparing various tributes, the most important being that of the Alte Nationalgalerie Museum in Berlin, which will open on 19 April: “Caspar David Friedrich. Infinite Landscapes”. It will be an important exhibition featuring 60 paintings and 50 drawings by the paradigmatic painter of German Romanticism, including his most iconic works. It was in Germany that European Romanticism had its origin through its literature, its painting and its music, exalting feeling above the preponderance of Enlightenment reason. Friedrich raised the genre of landscape painting to another dimension. Considered until the 19th century a genre of minor character, landscape painting transcends to the mystical at a time when Romantic philosophy was pantheistic, that is, where the world, nature and God are equivalent. This sacred and transcendental character of nature is manifested in his landscapes and his solitary figures, charged with symbolism.
Friedrich was born in September 1774 in old Prussia. In the same month and year of his birth, the epistolary novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was published, which made history by becoming the best-selling book in Germany. Of an autobiographical bent, Goethe’s impossible love for Charlotte Buff inspired this novel that ends with Werther’s suicide when he realizes that his passion for Lotte is unattainable. The love that transcends death in Romanticism: “Everything is ephemeral, but not even eternity itself will extinguish the burning life that yesterday I enjoyed on your lips, that I now feel within me!”, the young man writes to Lotte before taking his own life. Such was its success that rumors of copycat suicides pursued him throughout his life. This type of imitation took the name “Werther effect”, coined by the sociologist David Phillips in 1974.
With this book the first German Romanticism begins to emerge, although Goethe never considered himself a Romantic author and even harshly criticized it in favor of classicist ideals. But there is no doubt that he revolutionized literature with this novel by exalting subjectivity, freely expressing the emotions, individual nature, detaching himself from reason and with feeling prevailing. Romanticism is the expression of the infinite, of the unlimited, because the limited is the canon, that is, classicism. This movement begins as a rebellion against classicism, for the limits it imposes on aesthetic inspiration. Goethe was the foremost representative of the literary movement “Sturm und Drang” (storm and stress), which also had its manifestations in other arts, as in the case of Friedrich’s painting. This group would be a prelude to the Romantic movement, characterized by the rediscovery of nature, the nostalgia for the heritage of the past, the sublime versus classical beauty, or the concept of genius.
But it will not only be possible to visit exhibitions and concerts, but also routes along the paths that Friedrich visited and that inspired him, such as the Elbe mountains that he masterfully depicted in the painting “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”, the epitome of the sublime. A feeling that the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his work “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime” aptly describes: “The sublime moves, the beautiful charms. The expression of the man dominated by the feeling of the sublime is serious; sometimes fixed and astonished. The sublime in turn presents different characters. Sometimes it is accompanied by a certain terror or also melancholy, in some cases merely a calm astonishment, and in others a feeling of beauty spread over a generally sublime disposition.” That is, the relationship of conflict that arises between our understanding and the imagination provokes our sublime feeling toward what we observe. Fascination and terror before the unlimited, the immeasurable. “The Monk by the Sea” (1808-10) is another representation of the category of the sublime. In this painting, the solitary figure of a monk confronts the universe. His insignificance becomes evident before the immensity of the beach, the sea and the sky as a source of hope. It is another example of awe and melancholy that expresses this concept masterfully.
Caspar David Friedrich. The Monk by the Sea
Friedrich’s paintings are, without doubt, the best expression of the Romantic understanding of painting, in which artistic creation occurs in analogy with the creative force of nature. He believes that Romantic painting must be the language of that unity of the cosmos and of life, making the images free themselves from their subordination to everyday evidence to become allusions to the infinite. Night, death, the negative lose their hostile aspect and show their poetic face.
The nationalist element is also present in his painting. Friedrich was an adolescent when the French Revolution took place, which would convulse the European panorama. The Napoleonic campaigns in Germany boosted national consciousness, especially in intellectual and artistic circles. The new political order of Europe would then produce an artistic and intellectual energy that would become a new revolution in ideas and in the arts.
– Caspar David Friedrich. Landscape Painting to Another Dimension – – Alejandra de Argos –
