We always overhype our vacations. After a long morning’s climb the weather is clearing up, and we are peering into the distance, into the fog gathered beneath this craggy outcropping — high above Germany, or what is not yet Germany, where only little tufts of grass push from the bare rock. It was not an easy hike, but we had a purpose. This is what we keep telling ourselves, as we dust our Hessian boots or charge our D.S.L.R. cameras: Hike to the summit, behold the awesome view, and the sight of beauty will change our life.
Yet now, looking out through the thin mountain air … well, of course it’s spectacular. Still, when we look out at the mountains — at the picture of the mountains; we have trouble distinguishing, sometimes — the sensation that washes over us is not exultation but melancholy. This famous view we waited our whole life to see is missing details, seems washed of its particulars. Between us and eternity, between human understanding and the essence of the universe, lies a stubborn, obscuring bed of white cloud.
“Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” the wistful rear view that Caspar David Friedrich painted circa 1817, has the pesky distinction of epitomizing not just a single artist but also a whole epoch: the era of German Romanticism, when Enlightenment ideals of reason and skepticism unleashed a counterrevolution of passion and sentiment.
The solitary Wanderer, in his head-to-toe crushed green velvet, has become a metaphor for Germany itself, and the object of countless paste-ups and parodies. (Angela Merkel, recognizable from the back in her trademark pantsuit, was grafted into this landscape more than once.) Yet the Wanderer has never hiked as far as America, not until now, when from this weekend he will have his back turned to the visitors of “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature.” Already, on a huge poster adorning of the Metropolitan Museum of Art facade, our crestfallen hero has cast his gaze away from Fifth Avenue.
“The Soul of Nature” is much more than a showcase of one Romantic icon, and it has some surprises for audiences who associate Friedrich, and early-19th-century art more generally, with calm and tranquillity. Organized with three German museums, the exhibit includes 88 paintings and drawings, of rocks gleaming in the moonlight, solitary crucifixes in evergreen forests, and lonely Germans gazing out onto the sea.
That’s a lot more than any American museum has ever assembled (only two Friedrich shows have ever taken place here before; one of his biggest fans, Adolf Hitler, cast a long shadow on the artist’s 20th-century reception), but also barely half as many in a related show last year commemorating Friedrich’s 250th birthday. When I saw that show in Hamburg, Germany, I found myself dumbfounded by the sensitivity of Friedrich’s drawings, how he lavished attention on the hatching of stones and the ribbing of leaves, turning one lifeless boulder into a reflection of the soul.
That part-to-whole magic is a little harder to find at the Met, but the core of Friedrich’s achievement is still present in this show: the spontaneous, occasionally visionary gaze on the natural world, and the unrivaled ability to imbue one view with an entire philosophy of the world. Its curators, Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, stick up very hard for the virtues of landscape — a genre that, after falling out of favor in the 20th century, is rising again in importance alongside global average temperatures.
Most critically, as we keep failing to forge a culture serious about a changing climate, the curators here show us how tumultuous Friedrich’s glades and grasses really are. War. Nationalism. Religion. Industrialization. The world outside is changing, and the inner world too: racked by anxiety, cursed with nostalgia. It’s that double instability, that inner and outer climatology, that has turned Friedrich and the Romantics into my chosen guides through the Anthropocene.
Friedrich was born in 1774 in the Baltic port of Greifswald: part of Germany today, but then a holding of the Swedish crown. When he was 20, he left to study art in Denmark. The academy in Copenhagen trained students to draw the human body, first after plaster casts of classical sculpture, then from nude life studies. A youthful self-portrait here, with searching eyes and pursed lips, confirms that the lessons stuck.
But Friedrich didn’t like his Danish education, and he dropped out halfway to move to Dresden, a city with two big appeals. The Saxon art collections, then as now, are among the richest in the world. More important, this corner of Germany had become a hotbed for a new movement of poets, philosophers and painters.
His career started slowly, and not until he was 30, with a series of large, lonely views in the new medium of sepia, did he really figure out how landscape could become a medium of feeling. You’ll find the sepias in the second gallery of the Met show, and their impetuous sparsity still takes me aback. The sun sets over the Baltic, illuminating the rocks on the inhospitable shore. A shepherd walks along the coastline beneath an empty sky that fills more than three-quarters of the sheet.
No one before had distilled the landscape into such moody desolation. They are closely observed, technically flawless: Indeed there’s almost no visible brushwork in Friedrich, quite unlike the active composition of his English contemporaries Turner and Constable. But the angles are unorthodox, the vistas never very Arcadian. The few human beings, dwarfed by the rocks and the sea, are nearly left for dead.
What Friedrich was doing, with these sepia landscapes and in later pictures of forests, dolmens and icebergs, was rejecting the scientific or academic pretensions of art, and putting individual feeling first. That achievement may be hard to see for modern audiences, who have only ever really known art as an expression of the self. But this individuation was a sea change in the history of Western culture, one that the great German sociologist Georg Simmel saw as the hallmark of the Romantic era. In the 18th century, and in France above all, “there had been the thorough liberation of the individual from the rusty chains of guild, birthright and church. Now,” Simmel wrote of Friedrich’s Germany, “the individual that had thus become independent also wished to distinguish himself from other individuals.”
Which is to say: For these upstarts, the model of the citizen that emerged from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had come to seem too abstract and mechanical. The selfhood that Friedrich and his friends defended was going to have to be more spiritual, more ethical, more natural. Theirs was an inner freedom, a freedom that wasn’t naturally endowed but had to be made, by each of them, through moral and aesthetic education.
That freedom ripples through Friedrich’s art, and it’s what thrills me most in this show: the restless but ardent search for authentic sentiments in nature, even as he knows he will never reach the absolute truth of the world. I see it in the two friends leaning on each other as they contemplate the crescent moon over a half-uprooted oak tree. In the woman with outstretched arms, looking out on the sun as it rises or sets over a fulvous hillside. In the Wanderer, again, up in the air and lost in the fog. These Germans didn’t just want to be free. They wanted to be unique.
Where some Enlightenment authors saw literature as a domain to seek the best of all possible worlds, a Romantic like Heinrich von Kleist could write stories and plays where passion overtakes principle and justice does not reign. Where Enlightenment philosophers saw reason as the royal road to truth, a Romantic like Friedrich Schlegel could celebrate the very limits of reason, and put personal experience first. And where a doctrinaire Enlightenment philosopher might scorn all religion as oppressive superstition, a Romantic like Friedrich could — in his immensely powerful “Monk by the Sea” of 1808-10 — dress a universal unknown in a cleric’s robe.
This second-most-famous painting of his places a solitary observer in front of near-total emptiness, dwarfed by an infinitude of gray cut through with steely blue. (An infrared reflectogram of the painting reveals that Friedrich originally placed two boats on the horizon, then wiped them out.) Like the later “Wanderer,” “Monk by the Sea” uses the obscuring device of fog to tantalize our imagination and draw us into the picture’s mysteries. But the scale of man to nature is far more imposing here, the alienation more complete, and its barren grandeur points forward to — I don’t think it’s too presumptuous to say — the desolate beauty of Mark Rothko.
There is not much of a seashore to see in “Monk by the Sea,” just as the mountainscape the Wanderer beholds lacks the epic scale of, say, the Americans of the Hudson River School. (In an 1810 review of “Monk by the Sea,” an unimpressed young woman in the gallery moans to her governess, “That’s where goods from the colonies arrive.”) But that’s the whole point here; you don’t need to go all the way to the Matterhorn or the Grand Canyon to discover the infinite, because the infinite is inside you. As observed by the art historian Joseph Leo Koerner (a contributor to this show’s catalog), what’s sublime in Friedrich are not the mountains or trees — some of which, if we’re being honest, can tend into Bob Ross monotony in places.
What’s sublime in Friedrich are the subjective effects of these natural things on painter and viewer, or what a landscape does to an observer in history and time. The Romantics had a word for this: Erlebniskunst, an “art of experience,” in which what you feel has primacy over what you see. Shrouded in fog or illuminated by sunbeams, landscape for Friedrich was always finally a journey into the unknown, the geographic unknown but also the unknown of the heart.
“A stranger I arrived; a stranger I depart,” goes the opening of Schubert’s “Winterreise,” and at the end of this beautiful show, in late sepia drawings of caves and cemeteries made after Friedrich abandoned painting and lost his fame, this most German of artists depicted the German landscape as an almost alien terrain. And I think one of the many reasons the Met’s exhibition feels so timely is just how much of a stranger Friedrich remained in landscape — and how much human longing he located within his rocks and evergreens. Longing for God. Longing for stranger shores. Longing for death, maybe. I have my own longings now, my nostalgia for a nature not yet human authored, as I wander through a climate as distant from Greifswald as from Babylon. But we may yet find peace, a measure of it, if we learn to see in the fog.
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