Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) didn’t like exhibitions. Why would anybody suppose that placing totally different works, by totally different painters, in the identical room, could be an amazing thought? Subsequent to different, maybe showier footage, the canvas that appeared so luminous by itself would fade, Friedrich apprehensive in his late essay “Observations on Viewing a Assortment of Work”. He most well-liked to show his new works by themselves, inviting associates and colleagues to examine them after they have been completed, with none distractions, in his darkened studio. Probably the most attention-grabbing factor a couple of portray, for Friedrich, was not what it represented, however the distinctive immersive expertise it enabled, a transcript of the imaginative and prescient that had created it.
Now, on the event of the 250th anniversary of his start, Friedrich is getting exhibitions galore—two substantial ones in Berlin and Hamburg passed off earlier this yr, and others are opening, or about to open, in Dresden, Greifswald and Weimar, whereas a full-scale present (the primary such in the US) is deliberate for February 2025 on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, New York. Friedrich’s works are travelling farther than he ever did.
Wonderful dedication
Whereas Friedrich wouldn’t have objected to exhibitions devoted to his work solely, I wager he would have been even happier concerning the two catalogues now launched in English translations by, respectively, the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin. Sumptuously illustrated and heavier than physics textbooks, Caspar David Friedrich: Artwork for a New Age and Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes accord loads of area to the artist’s particular person work, letting them shine and glow on their very own, separate pages.
On the similar time, the editors of each these volumes are additionally concerned with touting Friedrich’s basic relevance, casting him as a Modernist earlier than his time or a proto-environmentalist, totally conscious that what we name “nature” is a deeply human building. Friedrich was, proposes Johannes Grave, co-editor of Artwork for a New Age, the right artist for the Anthropocene, as our current time is usually referred to as, by which people have left their traces all over the place on the planet.
No excuses
If Infinite Landscapes is greatest consulted as a sensible overview of the artist, Artwork for a New Age goals for comprehensiveness, supplying detailed mini essays on greater than 200 totally different works. In case you nonetheless affiliate Friedrich with only some stand-out work—amongst them Hamburg’s prize possession, the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (round 1817)—this assortment leaves you with no excuses. Take into account, for instance, Friedrich’s little-known late masterwork Ploughed Subject (round 1830, Hamburger Kunsthalle), so not like the forest, mountain and seaside scenes for which the artist is greatest identified. About half of the portray is taken up by a roughly ploughed, darkish discipline, lined, towards the center, by a slim band of meadow and a forlorn-looking parade of bushes. Whereas discipline, meadow and bushes appear to descend in direction of the viewer, that left-to-right diagonal is powerfully offset, within the portray’s higher half, by the sheer weight of the night sky, a mass of lavender-tinged clouds parting to disclose horizontal bands of yellowish-orange produced by the setting solar, a fading glimpse of a world past. If the ploughed discipline is prepared for brand spanking new life, then the dimming sky factors to its finish.
Friedrich’s well-known Rückenfiguren counsel that the human viewer is just not the measure of all issues
The individuals who seem in Friedrich’s work are often turned away from the viewer, as if to inform us how you can correctly take on the planet depicted—Friedrich’s well-known Rückenfiguren (back-figures). However in Ploughed Subject, the tiny determine of the wanderer, pushed to the left, hints that people don’t matter right here. Ploughed Subject thus leaves us in that ambivalent, hard-to-define area evoked in different Friedrich landscapes the place, to cite Mareike Hennig in Artwork for a New Age, the viewer is just not “the measure of all issues”—a reference to Friedrich’s Swans within the Reeds (1819-20, Frankfurter Goethe-Haus). A darkish, dimly moon-illuminated pond scene with two barely seen swans tucked away within the water on the backside, Swans within the Reeds strongly means that nature doesn’t want us in any respect.
Insurrection with reverence
Certainly, the label “artist of the Anthropocene” matches Friedrich solely loosely. His work derives its energy and ethical power exactly from directing us towards a realm that isn’t artwork in any respect and outlasts all efforts to include it. (Was that one of many causes Friedrich didn’t signal his compositions?) Modern artists, amply mentioned and represented in Artwork for a New Age, have grasped the combination of rebelliousness and reverence that distinguishes Friedrich’s greatest work. Their responses are due to this fact much less revisions than provocative acknowledgments of his lingering affect. See the Friedrich-like Rückenfigur in Swaantje Güntzel’s 2021 photographic sequence Arctic Yoghurt, the place we see the artist herself, in a blood-red costume, throwing a small yoghurt cup into the pristine waters of a Norwegian fjord, a gesture each pathetic and surprisingly violent.
A considerably gentler updating of Friedrich takes place within the work of the Japanese artist Hiroyuki Masuyama, whose painstaking recreations of Friedrich originals within the type of LED gentle packing containers (backlit photographic collages) obtain their very own part in Infinite Landscapes. Masuyama’s modifications are slight however consequential. In Moonrise over the Sea (2018), the observers have slipped into up to date costume, sporting hoodies, denims and sneakers. Which, arguably, is proof not of Friedrich’s modernity however of his timelessness.
Viewing two variations of the identical factor facet by facet, evaluating a portray with its copy or later reworkings, could assist make clear or, in some situations, complicate a painter’s intentions. Infinite Landscapes excels in presenting such pairings or echoes. Take Friedrich’s two winter landscapes from 1811. Within the model on the Staatliches Museum Schwerin, the gnarled bushes violently tilting proper and left seem to mock the snowbound wanderer, who can be surrounded by a military of tree stumps, a picture of utter desolation. Within the second on the Nationwide Gallery, London, the wanderer has thrown away his crutches and sunk into the snow in prayer. As if in response, the façade of a spectral cathedral rises from the mist behind him. Does the latter model of that scene supersede the previous? As Hilmar Frank notes in Infinite Landscapes, the Schwerin portray has “an expressive impulse” that’s lacking from the London model, the place the traces are simply too straight, the hope manifested too handy.
On his dying he hoped to go to not heaven however to the moon
But Friedrich in his quieter mode will also be remarkably highly effective. Infinite Landscapes reprints, in sequence, the three totally different variations of what was first referred to as Two Males Considering the Moon (1819-20). What a pleasure to trace the altering configurations of moongazers through the years—first two males, then a girl and man (maybe Friedrich and his spouse Caroline), after which once more two males—all ensconced in the identical softly lit, overgrown fairytale forest! Friedrich was, I believe, solely half joking when he as soon as mentioned to a pal, the Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl, that on his dying he hoped to go to not heaven however to the moon.
• Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes, by Birgit Verwiebe and Ralph Gleis (eds). Printed 14 Could/9 July by Prestel, 352pp, 265 color Illustrations, £45/$60 (hb)
• Caspar David Friedrich: Artwork for a New Age, by Markus Bertsch and Johannes Grave (eds). Printed 25 April/17 September by Thames & Hudson, 496pp, 400 color illustrations, £50/$65 (hb)
