Caspar David Friedrich: The Landscape Within
It was not until 130 years after his death, that C.D. Friedrich became known as one of the greatest painters of all time
I am not so weak as to submit to the demands of the age when they go against my convictions. I spin a cocoon around myself; let others do the same. I shall leave it to time to show what will come of it: a brilliant butterfly or maggot.
— Caspar David Friedrich
Some of the most beautiful art is art breathed — gently, impulsively, persistently, tenderly — from the depths of the creator into the medium one is using to mold the said art. And through that medium, that tool — over to us, its timeless onlookers.
In outstanding paintings the element of breath is always evident, always hovering between the brushstrokes, the colors, the characters, permanently giving a fresh gust of air to each faculty and sense. If God once breathed life into Adam, then each creator reproduces but forms and shapes and syllables unless they bestow that final breath of spiritual air upon their work — and through it, reviving us with the universe’s ancient breath of creation.
Caspar David Friedrich is the artist of breath, breadth, and expanse. His works must be seen in their live breathtaking gallery format or, at the very least — in a big, glossy book that smells of dry paint. The latter is how I first made the acquaintance of Friedrich. As a teenager, I loved two types of books: memoirs and art collections. My beloved holiday gifts were art albums stacked on my knees that I would get lost in for hours. Happily tucked into my private world that involved music, reading, and painting, my soul soared in the realms of great art.
When I traveled across the world for a permanent change of habitat, unable to bring my gargantuan collection of art literature along, I selected about a dozen beloved albums. The choice was cruel — moreover, since the person who was supposed to mail the others never did so. And yet, among the precious souvenirs, today I still own my huge and vibrantly colorful album of Caspar David Freidrich paintings, knowing that henceforth, it will travel with me wherever I do.
“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 […] His primary interest was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world […] Contemporaries such as the French sculptor David d’Angers spoke of him as a man who had discovered ‘the tragedy of landscape’”. — Biographical excerpt from Wikipedia
Caspar David Friedrich did not simply paint Romanticized landscapes, as may come across at first glance. His was a world reimagined and relived from within, a landscape of within.
Such is the famous “Monk by the Sea” in its poignant sense of the sea as a metaphor of the anguish of soul, perhaps even the well-known spiritual “dark night of the soul”, but also the majestic and overwhelming prowess of God and the universe, the prowess that upholds man on the small stretch of land resembling the palm of an Almighty Hand much more than a stretch of sand.
As Friedrich himself remarked, “The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but what he sees inside himself. If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him.” To no one was this commandment as sacred as to him.
In most of Friedrich’s paintings, even the ones that portray people, the protagonist is undeniably nature — the nature that Friedrich refused to squish into a smaller or tighter angle, as, to his indignation, did many contemporaries.
“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,” the great artist observed. “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.”
Contrary to merely “staying true” to nature in the manner of other colleagues in art, Friedrich overflowed to the brim with its might and entirely surrendered to its awe. He became its instrument, its mediator. And it became his muse, his air.
It was a similar urge of withdrawal into the inner world and into spiritual fullness that eventually inspired Friedrich to live a solitary lifestyle with his wife and a close circle of friends. Material prosperity slowly dwindled, yet the true riches he was leaving behind never became a source of doubt.
“I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full,” Friedrich wrote. “I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am. Solitude is indispensable for my dialogue with nature.”
Despite enjoying renown early on in his career, Caspar David Friedrich and his family were fully dependent on the charity of friends by the 1830s when the painter became increasingly ill, and his earlier works refused to sell as they “went out of fashion”— the same “fashion” that never guided his creative ideals springing solely from within.
After Caspar David Friedrich’s own death in 1840 and those of his close circle in the coming decades, his works fell into oblivion as a new school of realism discovered its greatest evils in the romantic idealism of its predecessors.
Friedrich was first rediscovered in the 1920s, his work exerting considerable influence over artists of the Symbolist and Abstract Expressionist movement such as Mark Rothko.
Yet it was not until the 1970s, one hundred and thirty years after his death, that Caspar David Friedrich became known as one of the greatest German painters of all time and the leader of the German Romantics — the name that now seems a mere tag for the breath and breadth of spirit struggling to find space in an artist for whom every canvas was too small for the vastness of the landscape within.
