haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

Caspar David Friedrich would never be alone as long as he could journey to the forest and the sea. They were all the company he needed, their bare trunks gathering the darkness in winter, their foamy crests the turmoil in his soul. When he faces waters and distant hills, there is literally no looking back.

He could have found his double in many another painting as well—or in the companions his doubles took with them to catch the rising moon. In 2001, the Met had a focus exhibition on Friedrich’s Moonwatchers (in the plural), not its last show of German Romanticism, and I excerpted my reviews of both just this week for you. Rather than start over, then, let me turn briefly to an ample retrospective, again at the Met, through May 11.

Friedrich will never be at a loss for company, but it will never be enough. The men here are anonymous, not the celebrated poet and painter doubling and redoubling the very notion of Kindred Spirits for Asher Durand in America, in 1849. Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog , dressed in black and hand on one hip, faces down what he sees, apart and alone, even as his gaze reaches out to infinity. The earth replies with the chilliest of white and uniformly cool colors. Where many a Romantic captures motion and the light, gestures and colors here are barely natural. And their dangerous infinite makes this the Romantic sublime.

Friedrich belongs to a long tradition in German art, going back to pale flesh and moist flowers in late Renaissance nudes and Baroque still life. Friedrich took nature as his subject, but not as a naturalist. Unlike John Constable or Beatrix Potter, he left few quick studies of clouds or botanical species. Like a proper student, he built a reputation in drawing before he even approached painting. The Met opens with local scenery and familiar faces in works on paper, including his a self-portrait. Only then could he test the limits of observation and human understanding.

As curators, Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein make a point of that slippery contrast between the visible and the infinite, the known and the unknowable. For Friedrich, it is also a struggle for the meaning of vision, between the seen and the imagined. And the imagination wins out. A cross set again and again on a rock in early work, much like the wanderer’s tall crag, looks out on a full moon. Sands at sunset become the stage for an allegory of the stages of life.

But what is imagined and what lies just next door? What of a the portal of a church or the western façade of a cathedral? What of an equally grand stone arch? Friedrich keeps you guessing. Facing each, one can feel the same ever-present chill. The show proceeds chronologically and by motif, but Friedrich found his subject and style early on, apart from mistier early skies and the more explicit Christianity, and never let go. So, too, did fellow Romantics like Johan Christian Dahl and Carl Gustav Carus, and their works, a handful also on view, are hard to distinguish from his. For all his virtues, sameness means predictability.

The familiar experience has made him a crowd pleaser. Who can resist warm associations and stark feelings? Who can resist knowing what to expect? Still, Friedrich darkens and colors both brighten and deepen in late work, as if the foreground were itself layered over the whole. His studio window becomes as prominent as what he found on the other side of the glass. The infinite begins with the picture plane and with you.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Infinite longing. One expects a decidedly romantic idea of Romanticism or nature after a stop for Caspar David Friedrich and lost souls. It also just happens to define Romanticism for Anita Brookner.

Brookner’s Romanticism and Its Discontents puts the emphasis squarely on the discontent. Her introduction to nineteenth-century French art and letters comes off all too pat and Romantic itself. Still, Romanticism truly deserves a survey as heartfelt and concise as this one. Last time I drew on past reviews of Friedrich at the Metto prepare you for its full retrospective, through May 11. Let me now place him in context of French and German Romantics, with an invitation to read more.

A movement so epoch-making may sound like an easy success. For Brookner, though, Romanticism means dealing with failure—and failing badly at the attempt. Her creators represent as many ways to cope with uncertainty. Some escape into idealism, art, and the Classicism of their teachers. Others look to determinate causes in science and humanity. Most found a hero in Napoleon. Each ends up with hardly more than a struggle, fatigue, and fancy ideals to which he himself puts the lie. Or so goes Brookner’s chilly romance.

Modern critics have opposed Classicism to Romanticism, using more contrasts than I care to remember—linear versus painterly, theater versus absorption, wilderness versus culture, primitive versus pastoral, authority versus community, aristocracy versus big industry, villa versus garden, and goodness knows what else. Perhaps only manifestos, historians, and art critics believe in periods anyway. Rebels against Jacques-Louis David, Voltaire, and Denis Diderot kept the revolutionary ideals of the first, the skepticism of the second, and the irony of the last. Nicolas Poussin and Poussin’s landscapes take Classicism into the Baroque with all its temptations intact, Delacroix paints like a Romantic while proclaiming his classicism, and J. D. Ingres echoes David’s line and idealized virtues while adding electric colors and an arm that manages to grow out of a sitter’s chest. One could debate forever whether Modernism ever outgrew Romantic individualism and a culture of capitalism.

Look again at Friedrich’s lunar vistas or the sea, with a dark clarity still visible in landscape art today. He and his countrymen celebrated not the unattainable, but a world newly at hand. One enters past maps of the lunar surface of incredible precision and beauty. Friedrich knew a little astronomy, too, when he included a ring around the moon. Earthshine, reflected light, makes visible just slightly more than half the moon. I imagine that scientists then would have told me just how much more.

Whatever the world, Friedrich invented it at its most luminous. He takes in a river or harbor scene around 1805—at age thirty-one, with a finely wrought view from the artist’s studio. Later a ship’s mast belongs to Woman at a Window, a painting of his wife from 1822. The mass reinforces the stasis and geometry of the window, shutters, and wall. Nothing else comes close to the deep red and green streaks of her dress seen from behind. Somehow she stands out from the same colors and handling, slightly toned down, in her surroundings.

Is that mix of public and private worlds what really drove Friedrich’s men to the woods? Nature lay close by, even to a city boy—too close by. Progress threatened to uproot nature, just as a massive tree trunk stands torn from the ground and erosion has left a protruding rock to survive the elements. It threatened to break forever the intimate link between humanity and nature. Fortunately, one still has artists and the imagination.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Have you missed the lavish retrospective of Caspar David Friedrich at the Met, through May 11? Me, too, until just days ago. If you follow my peregrinations regularly, you know that I have been laid up with ankle surgery since before it opened. I can only hope that I still have time to see a selection of the drawings that made his reputation and the paintings that make him a popular favorite.

I have, however, reviewed him more than once at length in the past. Nearly twenty-five years ago, the Met focused in on just two paintings, including Moonwatchers. I placed them in context of the very meaning of Romanticism, as seen in Romanticism and Its Discontents, by Anita Brookner, the novelist and art historian. And he was a man of his time. A decade later, the museum had an extensive survey of German Romanticism in works on paper, as seen through an open window—or, in the spirit of reflection, the subject of an open window. Allow me then two posts excerpting past reviews, with an invitation to follow the links to more.

Two men gaze through a wood at the moon. They may have turned to the forest for a connection to the night or for the sounds, smell, and light of nature buried in the sweat and toil of day. They could have sought each other’s intimacy, in the quiet of the night—apart from conversation that hardly knew when to stop. They have no weapons, but they could have sought adventure, swaggering in their broad hats and capes, confident in their powers to bring down their prey.

It hardly matters. Earthly quarry come way too easily. These men are in fact students—of the physical universe and the soul, the painter himself and a friend. They have stopped in their tracks, because they seek something farther and less attainable.

Instead of a fox, an idea, or the earth, they have gained clearing, and the moon stops them dead. The painter, Caspar David Friedrich, exaggerates a rise in the wood and distance to the sky with a low vantage point. He heightens the ghostly light with a color and shadow almost out of forest scenes in Bambi, if not out of a German tradition going back to at least the Northern Renaissance and Matthias Grünewald. Like the men but more literally, Friedrich steps quite out of physical space. He puts their motives aside, turning their backs to the picture plane. Now only the painter’s feelings count.

The painting appears in a haunting, well-chosen concentration. To help celebrate a new acquisition, the Met assembles two paintings by the German Romantic, several drawings, and a handful of other work showing his influence. The Frick Collection has shown repeatedly how much more a small show can bring home than many an overblown retrospective, and the Met’s restraint makes a familiar but elusive image fresh and intelligible. It may still run to hard-edged emotional overkill, but it is impossible to forget. If any painting could represent longing for the unattainable, this must be it.

Perhaps it makes sense that Friedrich often looks quaint or cartoonish these days, for all his broad appeal. The Hudson River School artist he most influenced, George Inness, can similarly look visionary or simply escapist. Friedrich did understand aspiration and failure. He knew personally Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who retold the Faust legend. Like Michi Meko today, he felt at home in the dark woods and a stranger in the urban wilderness. Life after Romanticism has had to battle the same issues of public identity and personal perception—with considerably less confidence in humanity and nature.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.