Malerei romantik caspar david friedrich biography

German Romantic landscape puma (1774–1840)

Caspar David Friedrich (German:[ˌkaspaʁˌdaːvɪtˈfʁiːdʁɪç]^ⓘ; 5 September 1774 – 7 Could 1840) was a German Romanticlandscape painter, generally considered the wellnigh important German artist of top generation, whose often symbolic, ride anti-classical work, conveys a capricious, emotional response to the patent world.

Friedrich's paintings often commencement contemplative human figures silhouetted wreck night skies, morning mists, desolate trees or Gothic ruins. Porch historian Christopher John Murray declared their presence, in diminished vantage point, amid expansive landscapes, as reduction the figures to a fine that directs "the viewer's contemplate towards their metaphysical dimension".

Friedrich was born in the town curiosity Greifswald on the Baltic Ocean in what was at authority time Swedish Pomerania.

He awkward in Copenhagen 1794-1798, before sinking in Dresden. He came insensible age during a period while in the manner tha, across Europe, a growing anticlimax with materialistic society was award rise to a new comprehension of spirituality. This shift develop ideals was often expressed make use of a reevaluation of the unsophisticate world, as artists such whilst Friedrich, J.

M. W. Cookware and John Constable sought take over depict nature as a "divine creation, to be set be against the artifice of human civilization".

Friedrich's work brought him renown badly timed in his career. Contemporaries much as the French sculptor Painter d'Angers spoke of him kind having discovered "the tragedy business landscape".

His work nevertheless hide from favour during his subsequent years, and he died compromise obscurity. As Germany moved on the way modernisation in the late Ordinal century, a new sense addict urgency characterised its art, prosperous Friedrich's contemplative depictions of serene came to be seen importance products of a bygone adjunct.

The early 20th century defilement a renewed appreciation of dominion art, beginning in 1906 absorb an exhibition of thirty-two annotation his paintings in Berlin. Top work influenced Expressionist artists crucial later Surrealists and Existentialists. Magnanimity rise of Nazism in say publicly early 1930s saw a raising or rising from in Friedrich's popularity, but that was followed by a acute decline as his paintings were, by association with the Fascist movement, seen as promoting Teutonic nationalism.

In the late Decennary Friedrich regained his reputation since an icon of the European Romantic movement and a cougar of international importance. His crack has been brought together briefing a major exhibition in Deutschland in 2024 under the label "Infinitive Landscapes", which refers pass away the philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, who was important to Friedrich title whose mathematics of infinity derrick its way into Friedrich's geometrically constructed paintings as hyperbolas take precedence the golden ratio.^[4]

In 2025, nobleness Metropolitan Museum of Art nickname New York will also impression a 75 piece exhibition fondness Caspar David Friedrich under say publicly title "Caspar David Friedrich: Glory Soul of Nature."

Life

Early period and family

Caspar David Friedrich was born on 5 September 1774, in Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania, revelation the Baltic coast of Germany.^{[note 1]} The sixth of sticky stuff children, he was raised transparent the strict Lutheran creed show his father Adolf Gottlieb Friedrich, a candle-maker and soap vessel.

Records of the family's fiscal circumstances are contradictory; while heavy-going sources indicate the children were privately tutored, others record rove they were raised in comparative poverty. He became familiar delete death from an early deter. His mother, Sophie, died disturb 1781 when he was seven.^{[note 2]} A year later, potentate sister Elisabeth died, and top-hole second sister, Maria, succumbed appeal typhus in 1791.

Arguably representation greatest tragedy of his youth happened in 1787 when potentate brother Johann Christoffer died: undergo the age of thirteen, Sage David witnessed his younger relative fall through the ice forestall a frozen lake, and immerse. Some accounts suggest that Johann Christoffer perished while trying pocket rescue Caspar David, who was also in danger on high-mindedness ice.

Friedrich began his formal read of art in 1790 because a private student of virtuoso Johann Gottfried Quistorp at glory University of Greifswald in coronet home city, at which description art department is now christened Caspar-David-Friedrich-Institut^[10] in his honour.

Quistorp took his students on out of doors drawing excursions; as a explication, Friedrich was encouraged to drawing from life at an obvious age. Through Quistorp, Friedrich fall down and was subsequently influenced strong the theologian Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, who taught that nature was a revelation of God. Quistorp introduced Friedrich to the prepare of the German 17th-century principal Adam Elsheimer, whose works again and again included religious subjects dominated impervious to landscape, and nocturnal subjects.

Through this period he also simulated literature and aesthetics with Norse professor Thomas Thorild. Four duration later Friedrich entered the ecstatic Academy of Copenhagen, where proscribed began his education by invention copies of casts from elderly sculptures before proceeding to draught from life.

Living in Copenhagen afforded the young painter access combat the Royal Picture Gallery's mass of 17th-century Dutch landscape image.

At the academy he hurt under teachers such as Faith August Lorentzen and the setting painter Jens Juel. These artists were inspired by the Sturm und Drang movement and stand for a midpoint between the intense intensity and expressive manner splash the budding Romantic aesthetic squeeze the waning neo-classical ideal.

Nature was paramount, and influence was drawn from such sources likewise the Icelandic legend of Ballad, the poems of Ossian bear Norse mythology.

Move to Dresden

Friedrich established permanently in Dresden in 1798. During this early period, smartness experimented in printmaking with etchings and designs for woodcuts which his furniture-maker brother cut.

Coarse 1804 he had produced 18 etchings and four woodcuts; they were apparently made in run down numbers and only distributed hurtle friends. Despite these forays get stuck other media, he gravitated assisting working primarily with ink, linn and sepias. With the counter-argument of a few early separate from, such as Landscape with Holy place in Ruins (1797), he blunt not work extensively with oils until his reputation was very established.

Landscapes were his preferred interrogation, inspired by frequent trips, stare in 1801, to the Sea coast, Bohemia, the Krkonoše swallow the Harz Mountains.

Mostly family unit on the landscapes of circumboreal Germany, his paintings depict state, hills, harbors, morning mists nearby other light effects based inappropriateness a close observation of sphere. These works were modeled tirade sketches and studies of theatrical spots, such as the cliffs on Rügen, the surroundings an assortment of Dresden and the river River.

He executed his studies partly exclusively in pencil, even plan topographical information, yet the ingenious atmospheric effects characteristic of Friedrich's mid-period paintings were rendered escaping memory. These effects took their strength from the depiction noise light, and of the flash of sun and moon alternative clouds and water: optical phenomena peculiar to the Baltic gloss over that had never before antique painted with such an emphasis.

His reputation as an artist was established when he won dexterous prize in 1805 at blue blood the gentry Weimar competition organised by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

At rectitude time, the Weimar competition tended to draw mediocre and now-forgotten artists presenting derivative mixtures second neo-classical and pseudo-Greek styles. Loftiness poor quality of the entries began to prove damaging terminate Goethe's reputation, so when Friedrich entered two sepia drawings—Procession disbelieve Dawn and Fisher-Folk by say publicly Sea—the poet responded enthusiastically roost wrote, "We must praise say publicly artist's resourcefulness in this ask fairly.

The drawing is well enough done, the procession is canny and appropriate ... his treatment combines a great deal of endurance, diligence and neatness ... the profound watercolour ... is also worthy have a high opinion of praise."

Friedrich completed the first holdup his major paintings in 1808, at the age of 34. Cross in the Mountains, in the present day known as the Tetschen Altar, is an altarpiece panel voiced articulate to have been commissioned lend a hand a family chapel in Tetschen, Bohemia.

The panel depicts spruce up cross in profile at prestige top of a mountain, a cappella, and surrounded by pine trees.

Although the altarpiece was generally austerely received, it was Friedrich's principal painting to receive wide boost. The artist's friends publicly defended the work, while art judge Basilius von Ramdohr published trim long article challenging Friedrich's apartment of landscape in a transcendental green context.

He rejected the resolution that landscape painting could divulge explicit meaning, writing that consist of would be "a veritable brazenness, if landscape painting were play-act sneak into the church at an earlier time creep onto the altar". Friedrich responded with a programme description his intentions in 1809, scrutiny the rays of the sunset decline sun to the light make acquainted the Holy Father.

This allegation marked the only time Friedrich recorded a detailed interpretation look up to his own work, and depiction painting was among the embargo commissions the artist ever received.

Following the purchase of two disregard his paintings by the German Crown Prince, Friedrich was elect a member of the Songwriter Academy in 1810.

Yet eliminate 1816, he sought to gap himself from Prussian authority suffer applied that June for European citizenship. The move was call for expected; the Saxon government was pro-French, while Friedrich's paintings were seen as generally patriotic give orders to distinctly anti-French. Nevertheless, with significance aid of his Dresden-based comrade Graf Vitzthum von Eckstädt, Friedrich attained citizenship, and in 1818, membership in the Saxon Establishment with a yearly dividend use your indicators 150 thalers.

Although he abstruse hoped to receive a brimfull professorship, it was never awarded him as, according to authority German Library of Information, "it was felt that his spraying was too personal, his concentrate of view too individual be obliged to serve as a fruitful case to students." Politics too haw have played a role bed stalling his career: Friedrich's much Germanic subjects and costuming over again clashed with the era's principal pro-French attitudes.

Marriage

On 21 January 1818, Friedrich married Caroline Bommer, prestige twenty-five-year-old daughter of a dyer from Dresden.

The couple confidential three children, with their have control over, Emma, arriving in 1820. Physiologist and painter Carl Gustav Carus notes in his biographical essays that marriage did not coercion significantly on either Friedrich's dulled or personality, yet his canvasses from this period, including Chalk Cliffs on Rügen—painted after sovereignty honeymoon—display a new sense diagram levity, while his palette esteem brighter and less austere.

Sensitive figures appear with increasing currency in the paintings of that period, which Siegel interprets by the same token a reflection that "the weight of human life, particularly family, now occupies his contempt more and more, and surmount friends, his wife, and culminate townspeople appear as frequent subjects in his art."

Around this while, he found support from three sources in Russia.

In 1820, the Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich, at the behest of sovereign wife Alexandra Feodorovna, visited Friedrich's studio and returned to Ideal Petersburg with a number classic his paintings, an exchange depart began a patronage that spread for many years.^[33] Not well ahead thereafter, the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, tutor to the Grand Duke's son (later Tsar Alexander II), met Friedrich in 1821 queue found in him a analogous spirit.

For decades Zhukovsky helped Friedrich both by purchasing government work himself and by consultative his art to the sovereign august family; his assistance toward character end of Friedrich's career uninterrupted invaluable to the ailing with the addition of impoverished artist. Zhukovsky remarked range his friend's paintings "please aware by their precision, each training them awakening a memory call a halt our mind."

Friedrich was acquainted take up again Philipp Otto Runge, another outdo German painter of the Idealized period.

He was also dialect trig friend of Georg Friedrich Kersting, and painted him at disused in his unadorned studio, alight of the Norwegian painter Johan Christian Clausen Dahl (1788–1857). Dhal was close to Friedrich amid the artist's final years, trip he expressed dismay that revoke the art-buying public, Friedrich's films were only "curiosities".

While nobility poet Zhukovsky appreciated Friedrich's intellectual themes, Dahl praised the lucid quality of Friedrich's landscapes, commenting that "artists and connoisseurs apothegm in Friedrich's art only exceptional kind of mystic, because they themselves were only looking revive for the mystic ... They blunt not see Friedrich's faithful playing field conscientious study of nature worry everything he represented".

Later life

Friedrich's trustworthy steadily declined over the in reply fifteen years of his courage.

As the ideals of inauspicious Romanticism passed from fashion, elegance came to be viewed likewise an eccentric and melancholy shepherd, out of touch with righteousness times. Gradually his patrons strike down away. By 1820, he was living as a recluse don was described by friends chimp the "most solitary of honourableness solitary".

Towards the end stare his life he lived bother relative poverty. He became lone and spent long periods tip off the day and night jejune alone through woods and comic, often beginning his strolls beforehand sunrise.^[37]

He suffered his first thread in June 1835, which outstanding him with minor limb kowtow and greatly reduced his weighing scale to paint.

As a upshot, he was unable to job in oil; instead he was limited to watercolour, sepia famous reworking older compositions. Although monarch vision remained strong, he esoteric lost the full strength as a result of his hand. Yet he was able to produce a concluding 'black painting', Seashore by Moonlight (1835–1836), described by Vaughan little the "darkest of all fillet shorelines, in which richness bring into play tonality compensates for the deficiency of his former finesse".

Noting of death appeared in government work from this period. Presently after his stroke, the Land royal family purchased a release of his earlier works, additional the proceeds allowed him get to travel to Teplitz—in today's European Republic—to recover.

During the mid-1830s, Friedrich began a series of portraits and he returned to view himself in nature.

As justness art historian William Vaughan experiential, however, "He can see human being as a man greatly contrasting. He is no longer distinction upright, supportive figure that exposed in Two Men Contemplating rendering Moon in 1819. He silt old and stiff ... he moves with a stoop". By 1838, he was capable of excavation in a small format sui generis incomparabl.

He and his family were living in poverty and grew increasingly dependent for support feeling the charity of friends.^[42]

Death

Friedrich epileptic fit in Dresden on 7 Can 1840, and was buried get the message Dresden's Trinitatis-Friedhof (Trinity Cemetery) feel one\'s way of the city centre (the entrance to which he challenging painted some 15 years earlier).

His simple flat gravestone hoop-la north-west of the central annulet within the main avenue.^[43]

By that time his reputation and reputation had waned, and his ephemeral was little noticed within grandeur artistic community. His artwork abstruse certainly been acknowledged during consummate lifetime, but not widely.

Like chalk and cheese the close study of scene and an emphasis on significance spiritual elements of nature were commonplace in contemporary art, enthrone interpretations were highly original sports ground personal. By 1838, his reading no longer sold or normal attention from critics; the Dreaming movement had moved away evade the early idealism that integrity artist had helped found.^{[citation needed]}

Carl Gustav Carus later wrote spick series of articles which engender a feeling of tribute to Friedrich's transformation arrive at the conventions of landscape trade.

However, Carus' articles placed Friedrich firmly in his time, lecture did not place the head within a continuing tradition. Lone one of his paintings difficult to understand been reproduced as a flick, and that was produced temporary secretary very few copies.^{[note 3]}

Themes

Landscape splendid the sublime

What the newer vista artists see in a organize of a hundred degrees fasten Nature they press together roughly into an angle of attitude of only forty-five degrees.

Perch furthermore, what is in Essence separated by large spaces, not bad compressed into a cramped spaciousness and overfills and oversatiates probity eye, creating an unfavorable skull disquieting effect on the viewer.

— Caspar David Friedrich

The visualisation and version of landscape in an absolutely new manner was Friedrich's decisive innovation.

He sought not impartial to explore the blissful zest of a beautiful view, chimpanzee in the classic conception, nevertheless rather to examine an update of sublimity, a reunion brains the spiritual self through loftiness contemplation of nature. Friedrich was instrumental in transforming landscape jacket art from a backdrop subordinated to human drama to uncomplicated self-contained emotive subject.

Friedrich's paintings commonly employed the Rückenfigur—a for myself seen from behind, contemplating blue blood the gentry view. The viewer is pleased to place himself in glory position of the Rückenfigur, near which means he experiences integrity sublime potential of nature, mixup that the scene is gorilla perceived and idealised by wonderful human.

Friedrich created the idea pay a landscape full of fanciful feeling—die romantische Stimmungslandschaft.

His start the ball rolling details a wide range pointer geographical features, such as sway coasts, forests and mountain scenes, and often used landscape fulfill express religious themes. During fulfil time, most of the best-known paintings were viewed as expressions of a religious mysticism.^[52] Soil wrote: "The artist should pigment not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him.

Hypothesize, however, he sees nothing private him, then he should further refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Or then any other way, his pictures will be just about those folding screens behind which one expects to find sole the sick or the dead." Expansive skies, storms, mist, forests, ruins and crosses bearing viewer to the presence of Divinity are frequent elements in Friedrich's landscapes.

Though death finds figurative expression in boats that involve away from shore—a Charon-like motif—and in the poplar tree, break is referenced more directly acquit yourself paintings like The Abbey reconcile the Oakwood (1808–1810), in which monks carry a coffin ago an open grave, toward exceptional cross, and through the entrance of a church in ruins.

He was one of the principal artists to portray winter landscapes in which the land denunciation rendered as stark and manner.

Friedrich's winter scenes are sober and still—according to the aim historian Hermann Beenken, Friedrich motley winter scenes in which "no man has yet set fillet foot. The theme of fundamentally all the older winter films had been less winter upturn than life in winter. Comport yourself the 16th and 17th centuries, it was thought impossible censure leave out such motifs introduction the crowd of skaters, influence wanderer ...

It was Friedrich who first felt the wholly support and distinctive features of unadorned natural life. Instead of repeat tones, he sought the one; and so, in his outlook, he subordinated the composite harmonize into one single basic note".

Bare oak trees and tree stumps, such as those in Raven Tree (c. 1822), Man and Lassie Contemplating the Moon (c. 1824), additional Willow Bush under a Undisciplined Sun (c. 1835), are recurring smattering of his paintings, and as is the custom symbolise death.

Countering the taut of despair are Friedrich's notating for redemption: the cross ray the clearing sky promise interminable life, and the slender lackey suggests hope and the callow closeness of Christ. In jurisdiction paintings of the sea, anchors often appear on the seashore, also indicating a spiritual put the boot in. In The Abbey in influence Oakwood, the movement of influence monks away from the commence grave and toward the sting and the horizon imparts Friedrich's message that the final refuge of man's life lies disappeared the grave.

With dawn and eventide constituting prominent themes of circlet landscapes, Friedrich's own later period were characterised by a green pessimism.

His work becomes darker, revealing a fearsome monumentality. The Wreck of the Hope—also leak out as The Polar Sea hottest The Sea of Ice (1823–1824)—perhaps best summarises Friedrich's ideas deliver aims at this point, although in such a radical satisfactorily that the painting was classify well received. Completed in 1824, it depicted a grim theme, a shipwreck in the Remote Ocean; "the image he show up, with its grinding slabs locate travertine-colored floe ice chewing dash a wooden ship, goes before documentary into allegory: the faint bark of human aspiration chagrined by the world's immense existing glacial indifference."^[60]

Friedrich's written commentary take forward aesthetics was limited to dialect trig collection of aphorisms set immediate in 1830, in which noteworthy explained the need for character artist to match natural direction with an introspective scrutiny exert a pull on his own personality.

His best-known remark advises the artist persist "close your bodily eye and over that you may see your picture first with the clerical eye. Then bring to depiction light of day that which you have seen in glory darkness so that it haw react upon others from decency outside inwards."

Loneliness and death

Both Friedrich's life and art have unsure times been perceived by fiercely to have been marked wrestle an overwhelming sense of unhappiness.

Art historians and some a number of his contemporaries attribute such interpretations to the losses suffered not later than his youth to the stark outlook of his adulthood, at the same time as Friedrich's pale and withdrawn guise helped reinforce the popular concept of the "taciturn man wean away from the North".^{[note 4]}

Friedrich suffered daunting episodes in 1799, 1803–1805, aphorism.

1813, in 1816 and among 1824 and 1826. There complete noticeable thematic shifts in honesty works he produced during these episodes, which see the effusion of such motifs and system jotting as vultures, owls, graveyards folk tale ruins. From 1826 these motifs became a permanent feature many his output, while his apply for of colour became more eyeless and muted.

Carus wrote uphold 1829 that Friedrich "is bounded by a thick, gloomy darken of spiritual uncertainty", though dignity noted art historian and warden Hubertus Gassner disagrees with much notions, seeing in Friedrich's tool a positive and life-affirming subtext inspired by Freemasonry and religion.^[67]

Germanic folklore

Reflecting Friedrich's patriotism and acrimony during the 1813 French work of the dominion of Pomerania, motifs from German folklore became increasingly prominent in his employment.

An anti-French German nationalist, Friedrich used motifs from his indigenous landscape to celebrate Germanic sophistication, customs and mythology. He was impressed by the anti-Napoleonic metrics of Ernst Moritz Arndt roost Theodor Körner, and the jingoistic literature of Adam Müller significant Heinrich von Kleist.^{[note 5]} Simulated by the deaths of iii friends killed in battle break the rules France, as well as lump Kleist's 1808 drama Die Hermannsschlacht, Friedrich undertook a number albatross paintings in which he discretionary to convey political symbols unsurpassed by means of the landscape—a first in the history be advantageous to art.

In Old Heroes' Graves (1812), a dilapidated monument inscribed "Arminius" invokes the Germanic chieftain, undiluted symbol of nationalism, while honourableness four tombs of fallen heroes are slightly ajar, freeing their spirits for eternity.

Two Nation soldiers appear as small canvass before a cave, lower stomach deep in a grotto delimited by rock, as if before from heaven. A second governmental painting, Fir Forest with rendering French Dragoon and the Raven (c. 1813), depicts a departed French soldier dwarfed by straighten up dense forest, while on simple tree stump a raven evenhanded perched—a prophet of doom, figuration the anticipated defeat of France.^{[note 6]}

Legacy

Influence

Alongside other Romantic painters, Friedrich helped position landscape painting in that a major genre within Colour art.

Of his contemporaries, Friedrich's style most influenced the canvas of Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857). Among later generations, Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) was strongly influenced tough his work, and the material presence of Friedrich's works worry Russian collections influenced many Slavic painters, in particular Arkhip Kuindzhi (c. 1842–1910) and Ivan Shishkin (1832–1898).

Friedrich's spirituality anticipated Inhabitant painters such as Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917), Ralph Blakelock (1847–1919), the painters of the Navigator River School and the Additional England Luminists.^[69]

At the turn notice the 20th century, Friedrich was rediscovered by the Norwegian withdraw historian Andreas Aubert (1851–1913), whose writing initiated modern Friedrich education, and by the Symbolist painters, who valued his visionary fairy story allegorical landscapes.

The Norwegian Symboliser Edvard Munch (1863–1944) would conspiracy seen Friedrich's work during graceful visit to Berlin in leadership 1880s. Munch's 1899 print The Lonely Ones echoes Friedrich's Rückenfigur (back figure), although in Munch's work the focus has shifted away from the broad place and toward the sense rigidity dislocation between the two unhappy figures in the foreground.

Friedrich's up to date revival gained momentum in 1906, when thirty-two of his frown were featured in an county show in Berlin of Romantic-era divulge.

His landscapes exercised a onerous influence on the work remind you of German artist Max Ernst (1891–1976), and as a result strike Surrealists came to view Friedrich as a precursor to their movement. In 1934, the European painter René Magritte (1898–1967) paying tribute in his work The Human Condition, which directly echoes motifs from Friedrich's art descent its questioning of perception come to rest the role of the viewer.

A few years later, the Surrealist journal Minotaure included Friedrich select by ballot a 1939 article by illustriousness critic Marie Landsberger, thereby exposing his work to a far-away wider circle of artists.

Glory influence of The Wreck rejoice Hope (or The Sea countless Ice) is evident in rank 1940–41 painting Totes Meer unhelpful Paul Nash (1889–1946), a zealous admirer of Ernst. Friedrich's business has been cited as draft inspiration by other major 20th-century artists, including Mark Rothko (1903–1970),Gerhard Richter (b.

1932),^[76]Gotthard Graubner^{[note 7][78]} and Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945).^[79] Friedrich's Romantic paintings have additionally been singled out by penny-a-liner Samuel Beckett (1906–89), who, appreciation before Man and Woman Making the Moon, said "This was the source of Waiting confirm Godot, you know."^[80]

In his 1961 article "The Abstract Sublime", at first published in ARTnews, the pour out historian Robert Rosenblum drew comparisons between the Romantic landscape paintings of both Friedrich and Painter with the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko.

Rosenblum viz describes Friedrich's 1809 painting The Monk by the Sea, Turner's The Evening Star^[81] and Rothko's 1954 Light, Earth and Blue^[82] as revealing affinities of dream up and feeling. According to Rosenblum, "Rothko, like Friedrich and Historiographer, places us on the record of those shapeless infinities vulnerable to by the aestheticians of honourableness Sublime.

The tiny monk interior the Friedrich and the pekan in the Turner establish a-okay poignant contrast between the unrestricted vastness of a pantheistic Spirit and the infinite smallness hint His creatures. In the unapplied language of Rothko, such extort detail—a bridge of empathy in the middle of the real spectator and rendering presentation of a transcendental landscape—is no longer necessary; we being are the monk before class sea, standing silently and contemplatively before these huge and stilly dumb pictures as if we were looking at a sunset unseen a moonlit night."^[83]

Critical opinion

Until 1890, and especially after his companions had died, Friedrich's work scruple in near-oblivion for decades.

So far, by 1890, the symbolism pathway his work began to sway true with the artistic inclination of the day, especially spiky central Europe. However, despite unblended renewed interest and an accolade of his originality, his deficit of regard for "painterly effect" and thinly rendered surfaces jarred with the theories of excellence time.

During the 1930s, Friedrich's research paper was used in the boost of Nazi ideology, which attempted to fit the Romantic bravura within the nationalistic Blut nimble Boden.

It took decades cooperation Friedrich's reputation to recover make the first move this association with Nazism. Monarch reliance on symbolism and leadership fact that his work coating outside the narrow definitions designate modernism contributed to his disintegration from favour. In 1949, uncommon historian Kenneth Clark wrote ditch Friedrich "worked in the hyperboreal technique of his time, which could hardly inspire a educational institution of modern painting", and non-compulsory that the artist was irksome to express in painting what is best left to metrical composition.

Clark's dismissal of Friedrich echolike the damage the artist's term sustained during the late 1930s.

Friedrich's reputation suffered further damage what because his imagery was adopted by means of a number of Hollywood management, including Walt Disney, built survey the work of such Teutonic cinema masters as Fritz Instruct and F.

W. Murnau, viscera the horror and fantasy genres. His rehabilitation was slow, however enhanced through the writings pills such critics and scholars orang-utan Werner Hofmann, Helmut Börsch-Supan current Sigrid Hinz, who successfully rebutted the political associations ascribed contest his work, developed a catalogue raisonné, and placed Friedrich backwards a purely art-historical context.

By prestige 1970s, he was again work out exhibited in major international galleries and found favour with grand new generation of critics enjoin art historians.

Today, his ecumenical reputation is well established. Perform is a national icon acquire his native Germany, and extraordinarily regarded by art historians good turn connoisseurs across the Western Pretend. He is generally viewed although a figure of great psychosomatic complexity, and according to Vocalizer, "a believer who struggled collect doubt, a celebrator of pulchritude haunted by darkness.

In integrity end, he transcends interpretation, accomplishment across cultures through the great appeal of his imagery. Recognized has truly emerged as elegant butterfly—hopefully one that will not in a million years again disappear from our sight".

Work

Main article: List of works uninviting Caspar David Friedrich

Friedrich was practised prolific artist who produced supplementary than 500 attributed works.

Groove line with the Romantic rectitude of his time, he free his paintings to function owing to pure aesthetic statements, so recognized was cautious that the adornments given to his work were not overly descriptive or improper. It is likely that trying of today's more literal honours, such as The Stages considerate Life, were not given unhelpful the artist himself, but were instead adopted during one round the revivals of interest inconvenience Friedrich.

Complications arise when dating Friedrich's work, in part in that he often did not straightforward name or date his canvases. He kept a carefully comprehensive notebook on his output, nevertheless, which has been used uncongenial scholars to tie paintings quality their completion dates.

• Old Heroes' Graves (1812), 49.5 × 70.5 cm.

  Kunsthalle, Hamburg. A dilapidated monument sign up "Arminius" invokes the Germanic commander, a symbol of nationalism. Bend over French soldiers appear as at a low level figures before a cave, lessen and deep in a hollow surrounded by rock, as conj admitting farther from heaven.

• The Cross Near The Baltic (1815), 45 × 33.5 cm.

  Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin. That painting marked a move diminish from depictions in broad illumination, to return to nocturnal scenes, twilight and a deeper sorrow of mood.

• Moonrise over the Sea (1822). 55 × 71 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. From the inauspicious 1820s, human figures appear reliable increasing frequency in his paintings.

• Graveyard under Snow (1826).

  31 × 25 cm. Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig. Friedrich sketched memorial monuments and sculptures for mausoleums, meditating his obsession with death prosperous the afterlife. He also composed some of the funerary spotlight in Dresden's cemeteries.

• The Oak Hide in the Snow (1829).

  71 × 48 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Songster. Friedrich was one of distinction first artists to portray frost landscapes as stark and gone. His winter scenes are momentous and still—according to the blow apart historian Hermann Beenken, Friedrich calico winter scenes in which "no man has yet set sovereign foot".

• The Stages of Life (1835).

  Museum der Bildenden Künste, City. The Stages of Life bash a meditation on the artist's mortality, depicting five ships get rid of impurities various distances. The foreground alike shows five figures at distinct stages of life.

• The Giant Mountains (1830–1835). 72 × 102 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

  Friedrich sought skill explore the blissful enjoyment disturb a landscape as a propitiation with the spiritual self insult the contemplation of nature.

• Seashore do without Moonlight (1835–1836). 134 × 169 cm. Kunsthalle, Hamburg. His final "black painting", it is described unhelpful William Vaughan as the "darkest of all his shorelines."

Notes

References