250 years of Caspar David Friedrich: Desire for adventure

Clear the fog

Dresden has the “Sistine Madonna”, Munich Dürer’s self-portrait and Hamburg the “Wanderer above the Sea of ​​Fog” (1818). No other painting is as well-known and as important for the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the entire artistic cosmos of the Hanseatic city as Caspar David Friedrich’s emblematic figure on the back. The portrait of the blonde man in a frock coat, standing on rocks and looking down into a foggy mountain landscape, is often seen as a symbolic figure of German Romanticism: it is about the development of individuality, the retreat into the private sphere and nature as a divine element.

Even after over 200 years, the image has not really lost its relevance. It evokes a desire for adventure and to experience nature in its wild, untouched form – something that young people around the world not only do but also share on the internet every day, often subconsciously drawing on Friedrich’s aesthetic. We, the image viewers for whom the man is a placeholder, know that the Sunday (and typically German) walk is the best way to introspect and organize your thoughts, to clear the fog. Friedrich’s probably most popular work symbolizes the desire for people today to pursue questions such as: Who are we and what do we want, apart from social norms, social expectations and media role models?

I now live far away from my hometown of Hamburg in the USA. I am all the more pleased that at the beginning of next year, for the first time in America, Caspar David Friedrich’s works will be shown – at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is time that German Romanticism, which paved the way for art movements such as Symbolism and Expressionism, and their most important representative conquer New York. By the way, the exhibition is advertised with the motif of the hiker – it’s not for nothing that they say that Hamburg is the “window to the world”.Jana Talke

»Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature«, 8. Februar bis 11. Mai 2025, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (USA).

Inner images

The painter should not only paint what he sees “in front of him,” but also what he “sees within himself,” said Caspar David Friedrich. The idea of ​​his vision only expressed itself in the image that he perceived within himself and which corresponded entirely to the state of his soul. But he then subjected his imagination to strict discipline: his images are compressed, constructed, well thought out. He occupied the landscape with iconographic symbols, created pictorial figures that will forever be preserved in art: There is not only the back figure in which the painter often sees himself and which, in its mediating function, also acts as a representative of the viewer, but also This also includes tree and forest, rock and path, cave and gate, ruin and grave, moon and clouds, land and sea, day and night, life and death. They become symbols and hieroglyphs in which the incomprehensible is intended to be made understandable.

Let’s look at three pictures from the retrospective currently being shown in Dresden: In the Tetschen Altarpiece (1807/08), the crucifix on the mountain top reflects the glow of the setting sun and casts it onto the dark earth. Even if direct contact with God himself is no longer possible, the cross remains as a sign of hope.

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“Two Men Contemplating the Moon” (1819): Framed by uprooted trees, the figures on the back stand in front of the abyss – a rock has blocked their path – while the moonlight in the background covers the entire picture surface like a light source. The moon as a symbol of changing time and infinitely changing nature – this light on the horizon fascinates and comforts at the same time.

In contrast, in “The Great Enclosure near Dresden” (1832) the space appears like a panorama, stretching into an unreachable distance, piling up into the vertical like a surface, allowing the eye to wander from the foreground to the background. The viewer is neither overwhelmed by the majesty of nature nor weighed down by humility, but is able to assert himself through his power of feeling and thought. The afterglow of the sun, which has already set, makes the sky shine in breathtaking colors.

The silence of these images dissolves when the viewer places themselves in their own emotional world and perceives this transfer from the inside to the outside. Friedrich made feeling and sensing, seeing and looking – inside and out – but also reflection the dominant theme of his painting.Klaus Hammer

“Caspar David Friedrich: Where it all began,” until January 5, 2025, Albertinum, Dresden.

line in the landscape

Man is so small in this enormous space! Hardly a tiny brown line on the deathly pale edge that only takes up a tenth of the picture. Behind it is just green-blue mass that seems to be rolling in like dangerous, dark slime. The sea, a deep abyss – or the desert nothingness? This is how we see Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Monk by the Sea” from 1810 today.

Even as a teenager, I saw this picture in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and was amazed at how everything here spoke against it becoming so famous. It has no depth perspective at all and is completely dissolved into surface area. The colors can only be described as indefinable, and you have to look for the person in the rear view, as lost as a needle in a dung heap, with a magnifying glass. And a lamp, because the entire painting lacks light. As a viewer, you literally feel your way forward. Ingredients for a masterpiece don’t exactly seem like that!

But a masterpiece like this does not consist of ingredients, rules and norms – but of that decisive expression that becomes the action of a visionary. And Caspar David Friedrich is undoubtedly one of those. He sees something that is obviously not beautiful, but seems necessary to him to bring it into the picture. Certainly, the pessimism is striking, but nevertheless this tiny brown line that claims to be a person on the shore of the sea is a striking counterpoint to the diffuse monotony around it, a sign of hope! He is alone, but he stands tall. What’s more, it asserts the vertical contrast to the overwhelming horizontal in the picture!

This reminds me of how Rilke loved his tiny Chatêau Muzot in the Swiss Valais, also because there was a poplar tree in front of it – which also embodied the vertical in the horizontal. Two years before his death, farmers felled the tree – and for the poet the landscape collapsed. From then on he no longer liked Muzot. So much for the tiny lines in the picture that can mean a world.Gunnar Decker

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