New York,
If last year began with the start of cultural programming aimed at commemorating in Germany, especially in Greifswald, the 250th anniversary of the birth of Caspar David Friedrich, this year the celebration of its landscapes arrives in the United States: until next May, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York presents “The Soul of Nature”, the first anthology of this author in America, which can be visited until May and emphasizes its treatment of nature as a space for personal discovery, philosophical reflection and also Devotion It is known that, taking advantage of the expressive power of perspective, light, color and atmosphere, the artist devised landscapes that articulate a deep connection between the natural world and the inner self, or soul, and that those images encapsulated the emerging postulates of romanticism, a cultural revolution that defended conceptions of individual perception and feeling that, to a large extent, we can consider that they remain in force.
Organized together with the Alte Nationalgalerie of Berlin, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen of Dresde and Hamburger Kunsthalle, this exhibition has loans from these three institutions and more than thirty European and American public collections and is the third that is provided in the United States to the United States German: the first two took place in 1990 and 2001 and focused, respectively, on their production in the Russian collections -the origin of Friedrich’s presence in the funds of that country explains it well Florian Illies in The magic of silence– And in his moon observers.
The current one in the Met turns to nature, personal but also representative of its time: as the Commissioner Alison Hokanson recalled at the inauguration of this sample, Friedrich’s creations are framed at a decisive moment in the development of the Human understanding of the natural world, and its landscapes, although much better received in the last decades than in the life of the painter, contributed to the intertwining of nature and the self, a sensitivity that would develop in parallel at the beginning of the industrial revolution and growth of what we call ecological awareness today. When observing his work we could discern, in short, the beginnings of an experience of nature that still lasts, both in our physical approach to it and from the artistic perspective and from popular culture.
We will find oil paintings, finished drawings and work sketches representative of Friedrich’s evolution along with some compositions of contemporary authors (Johan Christian Dahl, Carl Gustav Carus, August Heinrich and others); They have been chosen in order to emphasize the symbolic vocabulary present in their landscapes and relative to the personal and existential meanings that he discovered in nature. There is no lack of fundamental pieces that could not be seen in the United States, such as Walker in front of the fog seaarrived from Hamburger Kunsthalle, or Monk in front of the seafrom the Berlin Nationalgalerie; Yes, another icon had been contemplated in those previous assemblies: Dolmen in autumnwhich has crossed the ocean from the Albertinum de Dresde. Likewise, the five works of the artist who have many other American centers have met for the first time: Metropolitan, Kimbell Art Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Gallery of Art or the Saint Louis Art Museum; They are related to the rest of their work, winning context, and also together with an extensive selection of works on paper that will highlight the importance of drawing in Friedrich’s practice. It should be noted that the MET has increased in the last four decades its collection of romantic painting of northern Europe, barely represented in the funds of American museums.
Articulated from both thematic and chronological criteria, the exhibition recalls that Friedrich’s trajectory, close to four decades, coincided with relevant transformations on the German and European landscape, both in a purely physical and symbolic sense: the end of the 18th century And the first third of the XIX, in addition to knowing the rise of the romantic movement, were time for scientific discoveries linked to the territory, a nascent industrialization, political and war agitation. The tour addresses the weight in the work of the artist of spirituality and religion, his experience of the infinite and the unabarcable, his references to the passage of time and mortality, the suggestion of loneliness evident in some of his pieces and also that of The company that can provide nature, juxtaposition in some works of the family and the unknown and also that of beauty and danger, that conjunction that the romantics called sublime.
Anthology begins with Friedrich’s first years in Dresde, then flourishing cultural center and seedbed of early romantic thought. Working mainly as a cartoonist and engraver, he still experienced different styles and techniques to find his way, prior Danish training. His first works, based on outdoor drawing, reveal his appreciation of the natural world as a place of emotional experience and his less and less conventional approach to perspective and composition.
A second chapter of the tour stands out the period between 1803 and 1808, years of professional progress: Friedrich carried out ambitious ink drawings for public exhibitions in Dresde and Weimar, and works such as Arkona view with a nascent moon (Currently in Albertina Viennese) they raised considerable attention of criticism for both her technical virtuosity and for her alignment with the romantic taste of that time, for the capture of moods and also mystery. This view of the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea evokes, through the sober coastal landscape, loneliness, melancholy and yearning.
After making a name as a cartoonist, Friedrich began, around 1807, to focus much of his energy on oil painting. Many of his first compositions in this technique, made in the midst of instability and violence that wrapped their city during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), represent emblems of suffering and comfort: Christian crosses, crucifixes and Catholic monasteries abandoned abandoned a long time ago , common in the German territory. The vigor of these issues, and of their high personal faith, was increased by the artist with manipulations of perspective and atmosphere: their landscapes are land for the sacred encounter and, precisely, one of his most extraordinary (and explicit) meditations on the spirituality capable of being in nature is the aforementioned Monk by the searadically minimalist. In his words, he wanted to represent The unknowable beyond … the darkness of the future! Which is always a sacred intuition, which can only be seen and recognized in belief.
Although loneliness, an experience described with great intensity in that same image -inherent in its personality -is how we said an important issue in Friedrich’s art, its creative practice developed in the middle of a community of friends and family. The Dresden Academy of Art, which became a member and later professor, attracted classmates and students with related ideas with whom he could explore the landscape and exchanged ideas and methods. The camaraderie that shapes Friedrich’s art is documented in drawings made near other authors and also on canvases such as Two men contemplating the moonof the metropolitan.
At the end of the 1810s and in 1820, the obvious religious symbols that dominated Friedrich’s early work gave way to imbued images of spiritual associations in a broader sense. During this period, Friedrich developed numerous scenes inspired by the geography and daily life of places that he knew well and its marine and urban landscapes establish ties between family and routine existence and distant and unknown kingdoms. This dynamic could be summarized in Luna coming out on the seain which figures on the mainland look through an extension of water to the approximate ships and, beyond them, the horizon. In other works, including Woman in front of sunsetalso refers to the promise of communion with nature.
The next section of the exhibition explores Friedrich’s interest in the passage of time. The representations of the stations, such as the aforementioned Dolmen in autumnunite the cycles of nature with the rhythms of human life and history. The German felt particularly intrigued by winter, and created numerous works that capture the subtle colors of the station and evoke their associations to death and rebirth. Similarly, the dazzling watercolors of the artist of centenary castles, covered with vegetation, commemorate human effort and regret their ephemeral character. Following the Napoleonic wars, these vestiges of the past came to become emblems of modern political hopes and disappointments.
The romantic era marked the beginning of a new appreciation of the mountains as places of beauty and greatness and sign of the immense power of nature. Friedrich responded to the growing interest of the time for the views and sensations of the great elevations in The Watzmanna monumental painting of a peak of the Alps that represented with striking detail, despite never having seen it first hand. It was precisely the imposing character of the mountains that attracted the romantics of them; For these authors, the high peaks offered an encounter with the sublime: a mixture of beauty, danger, amazement and exaltation that acquires iconic form in The walker on the sea of fog.
At the end of the 1820s and early 1830s, the public’s taste would move away from Friedrich’s introspective and enigmatic landscapes in favor of a more direct form of representation. Although the artist’s reputation declined, he remained faithful to his principles. When structuring their compositions around large strips of earth, water and sky, embodied with sharpness but with reduced details, it imbued their last canvases, including The evening starof surprising visual rhythms. In this period, he also expressed his creative philosophy in the role, writing: “The task of an art work is to recognize the spirit of nature and, with all the heart and intention, saturate it, absorb it and return it in the form of chart”. The intimate connection that he perceived between the individual and the natural world is exemplified in The stages of lifework in which a group of people on the seashore, ships in the water and the clear sky suggest a moving meditation on the family, mortality and generational continuity.
To close the exhibition, a room focuses on Friedrich’s last years. Although his work had lost consideration to a large extent and the effects of a stroke made it difficult for him to paint, the creative impulse of this author remained intact. He returned to the water ink as his main creative vehicle and dedicated himself to representations of cemeteries, old tombs and empty beaches: images that reflect a wide philosophical interest in death and everything that may have been beyond it. These last works are a powerful cornerstone of the landscape set that had produced during the previous four decades; a visionary evocation of the complex relationship of humanity with the living earth.
“Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature”
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York
From February 8 to May 11, 2025
