Art: Caspar David Friedich: Staggering silence

By sending his own pictures to Weimar, Caspar David Friedrich managed to “gamble away every credit” with Goethe, says Florian Illies. Conversely, one could also say that the painter gave the poet prince the opportunity to get closer to his art through original works, although Goethe then squandered this credit. “Goethe wants to give the strange Caspar David Friedrich a chance,” writes Illies. Goethe asks Friedrich, whose ability to reproduce nature he values, to make cloud studies based on Luke Howard for his own essay in order to try to convert him to immediate realism. But this nature research was not for Friedrich. “I must surrender to what surrounds me, unite with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am,” he wrote to the Russian poet Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky.

In his book “The Magic of Silence,” Illies brings to the public what has almost been forgotten about the life and work of Friedrich, whose 250th birthday is in September. Although he is wrong about an apartment address, he tells us that Friedrich has developed a fire control system, or, like Walter Gropius, when he designed a “Monument to those who died in March” in Weimar in 1922 in the fight against the Kapp Putsch in 1920, he used Friedrich’s picture “Failed Hope” from 1823/24 with the towering ice floes in the Arctic landscape. Some of Illies’ explorations are shocking, such as the defense of Friedrich by Heinrich von Kleist, or the destruction and rescue of pictures or the spectacular theft of paintings.

Despite all the exciting changes of ownership and location of pictures, Ellies did not find out for the chapter “On the Sailor” that the Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich and later Tsar Nicholas I also bought the counterpart “Sisters on the Söller am Hafen” along with this picture on which motifs from Halle, the central place of the Pietist movement, and from Friedrich’s birthplace Greifswald are compiled and characterize the realism of the romantic images. Both counterparts were first shown facing each other in the English Cottage in Peterhof near St. Petersburg and now they can be seen side by side in St. Petersburg’s New Hermitage.

A brilliant idea was to divide the book according to the elements fire, water, earth and light, thereby finding an organizing principle for Illies’ mosaic-like style, which can lead to many times and different topics in short texts, but hardly allows for deepening. How did Friedrich want to lead people to a cosmic, expansive and moral worldview through a new, more subjective interpretation of nature? Through the individual artistic personality, the “temple of peculiarity,” as Friedrich emphasizes, it can lead to the knowledge of the infinite and probably also to the “magic of silence.” Friedrich sees the distant celestial bodies and cosmic natural phenomena as witnesses to the eternal and divine. In the picture “Two Men Contemplating the Moon” (1819/20), these two appear “poignant and reverent”. But to them the moon appears not just as a crescent, but as a complete disk. Friedrich probably also saw the astronomical aspect: the earth is illuminated from the side by the sun’s rays and reflected as earthshine onto the moon.

The empathy of the Russian poet Zhukovsky, for whom Friedrich was “the best and most worthy person,” is not taken into account by Illies. As a state councilor and friend of the Tsar’s family, Zhukowski was able to keep their interest in Frederick alive and obtain his financial support. And there is also no appreciation of the painter Caroline Bardua, who maintained good contact with Friedrich throughout her life. Her first portrait of the critical and attentive Friedrich (1810) was not only recognized, but in 1906 at the Berlin “Century Exhibition” it was even believed that it was a self-portrait of Friedrich. In 1839, a year before his death, Bardua visited his old friend, who had been paralyzed by a stroke, and found him completely broken and sick; Every morning she went to him to help and paint him.

A certain cheerfulness runs through Illie’s book, for example with the idea of ​​a memorial plaque for the back figures that Friedrich painted when he shows people from behind looking at landscapes. However, Illies also ends up in the depths of today’s dominant ideology: Friedrich stayed “essentially in the area of ​​what would later become the GDR,” for which “there was a special GDR stamp as a reward in 1974,” he notes. Friedrich “waived applications to leave the country (…), he didn’t even dare to dream of Italy.” He did not accept the friendly invitation to come to Rome, which Frederick actually received.

How was Friedrich classified in the GDR according to Illies? “As a forerunner of the Marxist view of humanity (…), indeed of socialist realism,” says Illies. Apparently he did not take note of “Caspar David Friedrich,” the 1964 book by the Dresden art historian Irma Emmrich, when he states: “Of course not a word is spoken about religion as a key to understanding Friedrich in the country that even the angels become ‘year-end winged dolls

Illie’s book has merit in popular science, but lacks scientific depth, even though he thanks many experts at the end of the book. Since they contradict each other in many ways, Illies, like Burian’s donkey, also fluctuates between dawn and dusk in the picture “Woman in front of the rising sun”. A realistic position based on the abundance of motifs that Illies often adopts for Friedrich led to a plausible result: the young woman is not suddenly at the end of the path, but will be able to continue on towards the Bohemian High Snow Mountain (Decinský Snežnik). is not a vanitas motif. Because this reveals the view in an easterly direction, only sunrise comes into question. “Awaken our hearts and courage/ when the dawn has risen,/ so that before we perish/ we can get up properly,” as the Protestant hymn says.

Florian Illies: Magic of silence. Caspar David Friedrich’s journey through time. Fischer-Verlag, 253 pages, hardcover, €25.