Ruth Leon recommends… Casper David Friedrich’s 250th birthday
Ruth Leon recommendsWho? Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation.
He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic or megalithic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world.
Friedrich’s paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs “the viewer’s gaze towards their metaphysical dimension”.
He was 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 waning neo-classical ideal. Among his influences were such sources as the Icelandic legend of Edda, and the poems of Ossian and Norse mythology.
For me, Caspar David Friedrich is forever associated with Hermann Hesse. His paintings were used as covers for Hesse’s novels in the Penguin editions. By and large, artist and writer left me cold.
You have missed-out on an entire world.
Friedrich was a master, with a subtle sense of the numinous.
The MET will have a Friedrich exhibition early next year.
Friedrich was a great artist, but strangely enough not because of his painterly artistry and technique, but because of his visions. His paintings may be empty on first sight, untill you begin to sense the strange atmosphere in his landscapes. In this he is like the impressionists who depicted ’empty’ landscapes with great skill in expressing the mystery of existence. In a way he was – like Monet, Pisarro etc. – demonstrating phenomenology, the philosophy that only came into existence around 1900 and focusses upon pure experience of reality.
I agree. I love Friedrich. He reminds me of the Belgian writer Rodenbach.