painting - Caspar David Friedrich
Photograph by MagicToDooron Flickr.
In the end, he transcends interpretation, reaching across cultures through the compelling appeal of his imagery. painting Friedrich s winter scenes are solemn and still—according to the art historian Hermann Beenken, Friedrich painted winter scenes in which no man has yet set his foot.
He was also a friend of Georg Friedrich Kersting (1785–1847), painting Rag painting who painted him at work in his unadorned studio, and of the Norwegian painter Johann Christian Dahl (1788–1857). Two French soldiers appear as small figures before a cave, lower and deep in a grotto surrounded by rock, as if farther from heaven. Alongside other Romantic painters, Friedrich helped position landscape painting as a major genre within Western art.
He has truly emerged as a butterfly—hopefully one that will never again disappear from our sight . Friedrich was a prolific artist who produced more than 500 attributed works. Old Heroes Graves, (1812), 49.5 x 70.5 cm. The foreground similarly shows five figures at different stages of life. The Giant Mountains (1830–35).
Completed in 1824, it depicted a grim subject, a shipwreck in the Arctic Ocean; the image he produced, with its grinding slabs of travertine-colored floe ice chewing up a wooden ship, goes beyond documentary into allegory: the frail bark of human aspiration crushed by the world s immense and glacial indifference. Friedrich s written commentary on aesthetics was limited to a collection of aphorisms set down in 1830, in which he explained the need for the artist to match natural observation with an introspective scrutiny of his own personality. 55 Ă— 71 cm.
Moved by the deaths of three friends killed in battle against France, as well as 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 (1812), 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. The drawing is well done, the procession is ingenious and appropriate.
72 Ă— 102 cm. Of this period, Linda Siegel writes, the importance of human life, particularly his family, now occupies his thoughts more and more, and his friends appear as frequent subjects in his art. Graveyard under Snow (1826).
He came of age during a period when, across Europe, a growing disillusionment with materialistic society was giving rise to a new appreciation of spirituality. Yet, by 1890, the symbolism in his work began to ring true with the artistic mood of the day, especially in central Europe.
Two French soldiers appear as small figures before a cave, lower and deep in a grotto surrounded by rock, as if farther from heaven. The Cross Beside The Baltic (1815), 45 Ă— 33.5 cm. Dahl was close to Friedrich during the artist s final years, and he expressed dismay that to the art-buying public, Friedrich s pictures were only curiosities . During this period Friedrich frequently sketched memorial monuments and sculptures for mausoleums, reflecting his obsession with death and the afterlife; he even created designs for some of the funerary art in Dresden s cemeteries.
It was to be one of the few commissions the artist received. The work was first exhibited on Christmas Day, 1808. Friedrich s spirituality anticipated American painters such as Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917), Ralph Blakelock (1847–1919), the painters of the Hudson River School and the New England Luminists. At the turn of the century Friedrich was rediscovered by the Norwegian art historian Andreas Aubert (1851–1913), whose writing initiated modern Friedrich scholarship, Friedrich s landscapes exercised a strong influence on the work of German artist Max Ernst (1891–1976), and as a result other Surrealists came to view Friedrich as a precursor to their movement. In his 1961 article The Abstract Sublime , originally published in ARTnews, the art historian Robert Rosenblum drew comparisons between the Romantic landscape paintings of both Friedrich and Turner with the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko.
1842–1910) and Ivan Shishkin (1832–98). The sinking of the sun suggests that the era when God revealed himself directly to man has passed.
Though death finds symbolic expression in boats that move away from shore—a Charon-like motif—and in the poplar tree, it is referenced more directly in paintings like The Abbey in the Oakwood (1808–10), in which monks carry a coffin past an open grave, toward a cross, and through the portal of a church in ruins. He was one of the first artists to portray winter landscapes in which the land is rendered as stark and dead. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards. He rejected the overreaching portrayals of nature in its totality , as found in the work of contemporary painters like Adrian Ludwig Richter (1803–84) and Joseph Anton Koch (1768–1839). Both Friedrich s life and art are marked with an overwhelming sense of loneliness.
Murnau, within the horror and fantasy genres. The Cross in the Mountains, today known as the Tetschen Altar (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), is an altarpiece panel commissioned by the Countess of Thun for her family s chapel in Tetschen, Bohemia.
This painting marked a move away by Friedrich from depictions in broad daylight, and a return to nocturnal scenes, twilight and a deeper poignancy of mood. Moonrise Over the Sea (1822). This shift in ideals was often expressed through a reevaluation of the natural world, as artists such as Friedrich, J.M.W.
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Instead of many tones, he sought the one; and so, in his landscape, he subordinated the composite chord into one single basic note . Bare oak trees and tree stumps, such as those in Raven Tree (c.
His work becomes darker, revealing a fearsome monumentality. His winter scenes are solemn and still—according to the art historian Hermann Beenken, Friedrich painted winter scenes in which no man has yet set his foot . The Stages of Life (Die Lebensstufen (1835).
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. 1835), are recurring elements of Friedrich s paintings, symbolizing death. With dawn and dusk constituting prominent themes of his landscapes, Friedrich s own later years were characterized by a growing pessimism.
This statement marked the only time Friedrich recorded a detailed interpretation of his own work. Friedrich was elected a member of the Berlin Academy in 1810 following the purchase of two of his paintings by the Prussian Crown Prince. On January 21, 1818, Friedrich married Caroline Bommer, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of a dyer from Dresden. Around this time, the artist found support from two sources in Russia. The Wreck of the Hope—also known as The Polar Sea or The Sea of Ice (1823–24)—perhaps best summarizes Friedrich s ideas and aims at this point, though in such a radical way that the painting was not well received.
If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. During the early 1820s, human figures appear with increasing frequency in the paintings.
Kunsthalle, Hamburg. He is generally viewed as a figure of great psychological complexity, and according to Vaughan, a believer who struggled with doubt, a celebrator of beauty haunted by darkness.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, it was thought impossible to leave out such motifs as the crowd of skaters, the wanderer. As the art historian William Vaughan has observed, however, He can see himself as a man greatly changed.
He is no longer the upright, supportive figure that appeared in Two Men Contemplating the Moon in 1819. I shall leave it to time to show what will come of it: a brilliant butterfly or maggot. During the 1930s, Friedrich s work was used in the promotion of Nazi ideology, Friedrich s reputation suffered further damage when his imagery was adopted by a number of Hollywood directors, such as Walt Disney, built on the work of such German cinema masters as Fritz Lang and F.
His final black painting , Seashore by Moonlight, is described by William Vaughan as the darkest of all his shorelines. . his treatment combines a great deal of firmness, diligence and neatness.
He studied in Copenhagen until 1798, before settling in Dresden. However, despite a renewed interest and an acknowledgment of his originality, his lack of regard for painterly effect and thinly rendered surfaces jarred with the theories of the time. I am not so weak as to submit to the demands of the age when they go against my convictions.
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. He became isolated and spent long periods of the day and night walking alone through woods and fields, often beginning his strolls before sunrise. In June 1835, Friedrich suffered his first stroke, which left him with minor limb paralysis and greatly reduced his ability to paint. During the mid-1830s, Friedrich began a series of portraits and he returned to observing himself in nature.
Museum der bildenden KĂĽnste, Leipzig. It was not until the late 1970s that Friedrich regained his reputation as an icon of the German Romantic movement and a painter of international importance. Caspar David Friedrich was born on September 5, 1774, in Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania, on the Baltic coast of Germany. Friedrich began his formal study of art in 1790 as a private student of artist Johann Gottfried Quistorp at the University of Greifswald.
Friedrich was instrumental in transforming landscape in art from a backdrop subordinated to human drama to a self-contained emotive subject. Friedrich said, The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. 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.
the ingenious watercolour. There are noticeable thematic shifts in the works he produced during these episodes, which see the emergence of such motifs and death symbols as vultures, owls, graveyards and ruins. Reflecting Friedrich s patriotism and resentment during the 1813 French occupation of the dominion of Pomerania, motifs from German folklore became increasingly prominent in his work.
1822), Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (c. The theme of nearly all the older winter pictures had been less winter itself than life in winter.
This sense becomes more apparent in his later works, from a time when friends, members of his family and fellow pioneers of early romanticism began to either become distant from him or die. Art historians and some of his contemporaries attribute the melancholy in his art to the losses suffered during his youth to the bleak outlook of his adulthood, Friedrich suffered depressive episodes in 1799, 1803–1805, c.1813, in 1816 and between 1824 and 1826. Friedrich sought not just to explore the blissful enjoyment of a beautiful view, as in the classic conception, but rather to examine an instant of sublimity, a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature. Seashore by Moonlight (1835–36).
Some of these works were lost in the fire that destroyed Munich s Glass Palace (1931) and later in the 1945 bombing of Dresden. Friedrich s reputation steadily declined over the final fifteen years of his life. Turner (1775–1851) and John Constable (1776-1837) sought to depict nature as a divine creation, to be set against the artifice of human civilization . Friedrich’s work brought him renown early in his career, and contemporaries such as the French sculptor David d Angers (1788–1856) spoke of him as a man who had discovered the tragedy of landscape .
31 Ă— 25 cm. By the 1970s, he was again being exhibited in major galleries across the world, as he found favour with a new generation of critics and art historians. Today, his international reputation is well established.
I spin a cocoon around myself; let others do the same. In 1820, Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich, at the behest of his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, visited Friedrich s studio and returned to Saint Petersburg with a number of his paintings.
71 Ă— 48 cm. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
Friedrich was one of the first artists to portray winter landscapes as stark and dead. The Stages of Life is a meditation on the artist s own mortality, depicting five ships at various distances from the shore.
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. Among later generations, Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) was strongly influenced by his work, and the substantial presence of Friedrich s works in Russian collections influenced many Russian painters, in particular Arkhip Kuindzhi (c.
During this early period, he experimented in printmaking with etchings Friedrich established his reputation as an artist when he won a prize in 1805 at the Weimar competition organised by the writer, poet, and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Friedrich sketched memorial monuments and sculptures for mausoleums, reflecting his obsession with death and the afterlife.
W. At the time, the Weimar competition tended to draw mediocre and now long-forgotten artists presenting derivative mixtures of neo-classical and pseudo-Greek styles.
Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin. he moves with a stoop . When Friedrich died in May 1840, his passing was little noticed within the artistic community. 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.
As the ideals of early Romanticism passed from fashion, he came to be viewed as an eccentric and melancholy character, out of touch with the times. 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. The visualisation and portrayal of landscape in an entirely new manner was Friedrich s key innovation.
He also created some of the funerary art in Dresden s cemeteries. The Oak Tree in the Snow (1829). Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important of the movement. Friedrich was born in the Swedish Pomeranian town of Greifswald, where he began his studies in art as a youth.
His best-known remark advises the artist to close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. He sought not just to explore the blissful enjoyment of a beautiful view, as in the classic conception, but rather to examine an instant of sublimity, a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature.
Gradually his patrons fell away. Museum der Bildenden KĂĽnste, Leipzig.
He is old and stiff. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead. Expansive skies, storms, mist, forests, ruins and crosses bearing witness to the presence of God are frequent elements in Friedrich s landscapes.
Quistorp took his students on outdoor drawing excursions; as a result, Friedrich was encouraged to sketch from life at an early age. Friedrich settled permanently in Dresden in 1798. Of his contemporaries, Friedrich s style most influenced the painting of Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857).
He is a national icon in his native Germany, and highly regarded by art historians and art connoisseurs across the Western World. The exchange marked the beginning of a patronage that continued for many years. Friedrich was acquainted with Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810), another leading German painter of the Romantic period.
Rosenblum specifically describes Friedrich s 1809 painting The Monk by the Sea, Turner s The Evening Star Until 1890, and especially after his friends had died, Friedrich s work lay in near-oblivion for decades. is also worthy of praise. Friedrich completed the first of his major paintings in 1807, at the age of 34.
1833), and Willow Bush under a Setting Sun (c. The poor quality of the entries began to prove damaging to Goethe s reputation, so when Friedrich entered two sepia drawings—Procession at Dawn and Fisher-Folk by the Sea—the poet responded enthusiastically and wrote, We must praise the artist s resourcefulness in this picture fairly.
It was Friedrich who first felt the wholly detached and distinctive features of a natural life.
