Caspar David Friedrich

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Image:Self-portait by Caspar David Friedrich.jpgImage:Caspar studio.jpg Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840) was a 19th century German romantic painter, considered by many critics to be one of the finest exemplars of the movement.

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Life

Born in Greifswald, a small town in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (at the time Swedish territory, now Germany) Friedrich was the son of a candle-maker, from whom he received a religious education which would influence his work. Another possible influence on Friedrich's work was the witnessing of the premature death of one of his brothers while ice skating in the frozen Baltic sea. This incident could be a possible reason for the tragic and sometimes lugubrious visions portrayed in his art. After previous lessons of drawing and etching with a local master, Quistorp, Friedrich studied at Copenhagen from 1794 to 1798 under Nikolaj Abraham Abildgaard and Jens Juel. After leaving Copenhagen, he visited several scenic spots in Germany before settling in Dresden.There he was in touch with the best cultural and artistical personalities of the time in Germany like Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, Schelling , Phillip Otto Runge and Carl Gustav Carus.Fellow artists and friends described him as a mysterious and mystic character, with an almost monkish lifestyle. His studio was bare and kept only the essential tools for work. He needed solitude and introspection to achieve his visions as he wrote:"Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with your spiritual eye then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react on others from the outside inwards." After a long period of bachelorhood devoted to his art, he married with young Caroline Bommer in 1818 of whom he had three children (one of them, Emma, died in childhood). This led him to valorize human figure in his compositions. In 1817 he became a member of the Academy of Dresden and around 1820 Nicholas I, future Czar of Russia, visited his studio and became one of his patrons which led to the purchase of many paintings. Frederick William III, king of Prussia, was also an enthusiast of his art. Although his reserved and introspective personality was an obstacle to success, by this time he was a recognized and successful painter. The years immediately prior to his death were made painful by declining health (in 1835 suffered a stroke) which prevented him from painting in oil. Caspar David Friedrich died in Dresden, almost in oblivion.

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Work

Image:Caspar David Friedrich - Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer.jpg Image:Caspar David Friedrich 028.jpg Image:Monk by the sea.jpg Image:Chalk cliffs.jpg Image:The sea of ice.jpg After the development of sepia drawings and watercolours (mainly naturalistic and topographical) Friedrich took up oil painting after the age of thirty. His paintings were modeled after live sketches and studies of scenic spots, like the cliffs on Rügen, the surroundings of Dresden or Elbe and later composed in symbolic, often symmetrically balanced, compositions. His first mature style painting is the "Tetschen Altar"(1807) in which the crucified Christ is seen in profile in the top of a mountain, alone, surrounded by nature. In his time this work was not unanimously accepted for the principal role of landscape in a religious subject, however, this was his first appraised painting. His famous morbidly romantic painting "Mönch am Meer" (Monk by the Sea) impressed Karl Friedrich Schinkel (later Prussia's most famous classicist architect) so much that he gave up painting and took up architecture, much to the benefit of German and world architecture.

His paintings portray the untamed power of nature and the religious or pantheistic feeling within it; this is in sharp contrast to Enlightenment-era painters such as Thomas Gainsborough, who used nature to bring out qualities in their human subjects. In Friedrich´s case it is God; our existential solitude and smallness before Him and nature is brought up, and in some sense his work can be seen as religious. The human beings depicted in his work seem to seek redemption or spiritual dialogue in Nature in which God seems to be immanent. Some of his desolate landscapes are thought to look like a biblical apocalypse. Persons are often seen by their back, contemplating landscapes and are a "medium" between the viewer of the painting and the background landscape which is an allegory to spirituality. This pantheism is in tune with the German philosophy of this era and the thinking of Hegel, Schelling or Schlegel.

His work is often read as expressing German patriotism during the time of the Napoleonic Wars and in fact Friedrich was anti-Napoleon. The occupation tortured his soul, and his political disillusionment grew worse over time. The portrayal of gothic cathedrals or churches can be seen both as a symbol of God and a statement against classicist art (common to many other romantic artists). It can also be seen as an affirmation of a genuine germanic tradition of art out of Italian or classical influences. Friedrich´s masterpieces were almost forgotten by the general public in the second half of 19th century and only at the end of 19th and beginning of 20th century he was rediscovered by Symbolist painters for his visionary and allegorical landscapes. For that same reason Max Ernst and other surrealists saw him as a precursor of their movement.

In an abusive and disgraceful interpretation Adolf Hitler would later cite Friedrich's work as expressing the Aryan ideals and co-opted a painting as a cover for a Nazi propaganda magazine, making some contemporary critics and art historians reluctant to promote Friedrich's high quality work. As well as other romantic painter like Turner or Constable he made landscape painting a major genre in western art. Friedrich's style influenced the painting of the Norwegian Johann Christian Dahl but the heirs of his painting style did not achieve his mastery and depth. Arnold Böcklin was strongly influenced by his work and perhaps also the painters of the American Hudson River School, the Rocky Mountain School, and the New England Luminists. Friedrich also sketched monuments (a memorial) and sculptures for mausoleums, which reflects his obssession with death and afterlife, and some funereal art in Dresden´s cemeteries are his.

Some of his masterpieces were destroyed due to a fire in Munich's Glass Palace (1931) and in World War II bombing in Dresden.

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Quotes

"The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself. If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him.", Caspar David Friedrich

"A mountain of ice and the debris of a ship that has been crushed by it. It is a great tragedy, not a single survivor.", David d´Angers, 19th century French sculptor about "The sea of ice".

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Selected works

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External links

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