THE ROMANTIC VISION OF CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH
This otherness is perhaps less surprising in light of the fact that Friedrich, who was born in 1774 and died in 1840, is generally regarded as the greatest German Romantic painter. Friedrich lived most of his life in Dresden and was acquainted with and admired by Goethe and Schopenhauer; but his reputation, though once great, was already declining in his own lifetime, only to be reborn in our century. Though his paintings show a meticulous observation of nature’s details, and a notably Germanic precision of line, they always evoke, with a paradox characteristic of Romanticism, the realm of the invisible, the unseeable beyond. He once wrote, as an instruction to himself, “Close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to light that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards.”
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At least half the works in this show contain imagery of passage. One is always aware in these images of the process of moving from one state of existence to another, the second often, but not always, connected with nature. In On the Sailboat, for instance, the lines of the boat’s sides and prow, the edges of the sails, and the two figures seated at the bow all lead the eye toward the spires of a distant, imaginary city. Similarly, the two women in Sisters on the Harbor-View Terrace view a misty cathedral and ships’ masts. But they, like most of Friedrich’s figures, are surrogates for the viewer, whose eye moves from behind their heads, along their lines of sight, toward the more distant view. It is to Friedrich’s great credit that, as with Moonrise by the Sea, the eye’s movement is not then arrested on a static, picture-postcard scene. The masts and spires, enveloped in dusky light, lead the eye on unpredictable paths, back and forth across the surface of the canvas. At the same time, these forms, seen dimly through the fog, appear to vibrate between the visible and the invisible.
In Memory of the Riesengebirge is a large, daylit canvas of a mountain scene; the most distant peak is one Friedrich climbed in his youth. This 1835 painting was one of Friedrich’s last, before a stroke restricted him to drawing; its rough texture perhaps evokes some of the roughness of the terrain as felt by one who walked it. There are no human figures, no framing devices, but the perspective–with successively higher peaks leading off toward the left, the highest peak almost lost in sky–makes the viewer acutely aware that the picture, a rectangle, is the ultimate window. Just as we look through the window in Window With a View of a Park, so here we are aware that we are looking through a rectangle, into an ultimate beyond. The absence of surrogate figures in these two works is part of what makes them so direct, and so profound: the only narrative in the picture is the viewer’s process of discovering its ever-deepening space. I almost felt, as the writer Heinrich von Kleist wrote of a different Friedrich picture, as if my “eyelids had been cut away.”
