Caspar David Friedrich
Two Men Contemplating the Moon, ca. 1825–30
Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840)
Oil on canvas
13 3/4 x 17 1/4 in. (34.9 x 43.8 cm)
Wrightsman Fund, 2000 (2000.51)
Research
There is a biography written about Friedrich at <http://www.caspardavidfriedrich.org/biography.html>.
If you want to see mor ethan what’s here, please read the biography there instead of me trying to
paraphrase in this document.
One quote I liked and seemed to show overall how his works were viewed at the time was by Norwegian
painter Johann Christian Dahl. He said, "Artists and connoisseurs saw in Friedrich's art only a kind of
mystic, because they themselves were only looking out for the mystic ... They did not see Friedrich's
faithful and conscientious study of nature in everything he represented".
As an artist, Friedrich was intensely captivated by seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. I will
have examples of this in the slide show. There are some on view at the Mint Museum on Randolph
Road.
This next site also offers biographical information on the artist. Now please see
that there isn’t much for me to go on here as to what is fact and what is not. The
MET has some information that corraberates some of the facts. I am hoping that
the link to the artsist foundation on the first site means that the author chose to
translate some of their scholarly research. So I guess the less life details given
the better. Stick to what seems easily verified.
Figure 1
Self Portrait 1800
Age 26
http://www.augustastylianougallery.com/Gallery/CasparDavidFriedrich/CasparDavidFriedrich.html
This Internet editor writes that
Friedrich settled permanently in Dresden in 1798. During this early period, he
experimented in printmaking with etchings and designs for woodcuts which his
furniture-maker brother cut. By 1804 he had produced 18 etchings and four woodcuts;
they were apparently made in small numbers and only distributed to friends.[20]
Despite these forays into other media, he gravitated toward working primarily with ink,
watercolor and sepias. With the exception of a few early pieces, such as Landscape
with Temple in Ruins (1797), he did not work extensively with oils until his reputation
was more established. Landscapes were his preferred subject, inspired by frequent
trips, beginning in 1801, to the Baltic coast, Bohemia, the Riesen and the Harz
Mountains. Mostly based on the landscapes of northern Germany, his paintings depict
woods, hills, harbors, morning mists and other light effects based on a close
observation of nature. These works were modeled on sketches and studies of scenic
spots, such as the cliffs on Rügen, the surroundings of Dresden and the river Elbe. He
executed his studies almost exclusively in pencil, even providing topographical
information, yet the subtle atmospheric effects characteristic of Friedrich's mid-period
paintings were rendered from memory. These effects took their strength from the
depiction of light, and of the illumination of sun and moon on clouds and water: optical
phenomena peculiar to the Baltic coast that had never before been painted with such
an emphasis.
In the end he describes Friedrich an artist with
His international reputation is well established. He is a national icon in his native
Germany, and highly regarded by art historians and art connoisseurs across the
Western World. He is generally viewed as a figure of great psychological complexity,
and according to Vaughan, "a believer who struggled with doubt, a celebrator of
beauty haunted by darkness. In the end, he transcends interpretation, reaching across
cultures through the compelling appeal of his imagery. He has truly emerged as a
butterfly—hopefully one that will never again disappear from our sight".
The painting that holds our focus this month has some interesting descriptions on the MET’s site:
This is the third version of one of this artist's most famous paintings, of which the first
(1819) is in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, and the second (ca. 1824) is in the Alte
Nationalgalerie, Berlin. The two men contemplating the sinking moon have been
identified as Friedrich himself, on the right, and his talented young colleague August
Heinrich (1794-1822). The mood of pious contemplation relates to fascination with the
moon as expressed in contemporary poetry, literature, philosophy, and music. Both
figures are seen from the back so that the viewer can participate in their communion
with nature, which the Romantics saw as a manifestation of the Sublime.
Although the landscape is imaginary, it is based on studies after nature that Friedrich
had made in various regions at different times. Both men wear Old German dress,
which had been adopted in 1815 by radical students as an expression of opposition to
the ultraconservative policies then being enforced in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.
The staunchly patriotic Friedrich deliberately ignored the 1819 royal decree forbidding
this practice and depicted figures in traditional costume until his death.
This is a variant of a painting of 1819 that shows the same gnarled oak but different
figures and a dramatic night sky (B-S 261; Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden, inv.
no. 2194). A second variant of about 1825 depicts a man and a woman at dusk, "Man
and Woman Contemplating the Moon" (B-S XLIII; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin).
http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/110003080
Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained
momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the
nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the
imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment
with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French
Revolution of 1789.
In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential
for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of
Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by
Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated
by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French
philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, "all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a
feeling of terror, leads to the sublime." In French and British painting of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks
(2003.42.56) and other representations of man's struggle against the awesome power
of nature manifest this sensibility.
But Romantic art was about other subjects as well. There were fantastical images, paintings of far away
countries to which artists have never been and unconventional portraits.
In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization.
As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, "Romanticism is precisely
situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling."
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm
His influences came from Dutch painters as well as his teachers. See the slide show for the images that I
reference here.
The Maas at Dordrecht, c. 1650
by Aelbert Cuyp
http://www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/tinfo_f?object=576&detail=note
A Skovegn. The early morning before the sunrise, ca. 1708
Oil on canvas
By Jens Juel (1745 - 1802).
http://kunst.museum.odense.dk/billedvis.asp?billednr=94078&antal=16&languag
e=da
And in turn he influenced many after him…..
Alongside other Romantic painters, Friedrich helped position landscape painting as a major
genre within Western art. Of his contemporaries, Friedrich's style most influenced the painting of
Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857). Among later generations, Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) was
strongly influenced by his work, and the substantial presence of Friedrich's works in Russian
collections influenced many Russian painters, in particular Arkhip Kuindzhi (c. 1842–1910) and
Ivan Shishkin (1832–98). Friedrich's spirituality anticipated American painters such as Albert
Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917), Ralph Blakelock (1847–1919), the painters of the Hudson River
School and the New England Luminists.
Edvard Munch, The Lonely Ones, (1899). Woodcut. Munch Museum, Oslo
At the turn of the 20th century Friedrich was rediscovered by the Norwegian art historian
Andreas Aubert (1851–1913), whose writing initiated modern Friedrich scholarship, and by the
Symbolist painters, who valued his visionary and allegorical landscapes. The Norwegian
Symbolist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) would have seen Friedrich's work during a visit to Berlin
in the 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 landscape and toward the
sense of dislocation between the two melancholy figures in the foreground.
Friedrich's landscapes exercised a strong influence on the work of German artist Max Ernst
(1891–1976), and as a result other Surrealists came to view Friedrich as a precursor to their
movement. In 1934, the Belgian painter René Magritte (1898–1967) paid tribute in his work The
Human Condition, which directly echoes motifs from Friedrich's art in its questioning of
perception and the role of the viewer. A few years later, the Surrealist journal Minotaur featured
Friedrich in a 1939 article by critic Marie Landsberger, thereby exposing his work to a far wider
circle of artists. The influence of The Wreck of Hope (or The Sea of Ice) is evident in the 1940–
41 painting Totes Meer by Paul Nash (1889–1946), a fervent admirer of Ernst. Friedrich's work
has been cited as an inspiration by other major 20th-century artists, including Mark Rothko
(1903–70), Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) and Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945).[78] Friedrich's Romantic
paintings have also been singled out by writer Samuel Beckett (1906–89), who, standing before
Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, said "This was the source of Waiting for Godot, you
know."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_David_Friedrich
Additional Notes
Painters often would paint landscape from their studios after doing studies of locations outdoors. Their
final works could end up being a combination of several locations they had studied.
Activities
Please remember to sign out all materials on the art Appreciation Calendar. If any supplies
get low, please let me know ASAP. I may not see it until the end of the month myself.
1.
Have students create a quiet picture. They can use any materials you like. We have oil pastels,
the closest to oil paints we can get, in the PTA Room. The Art Appreciation drawers are in the
bottom of the filing cabinet. You’ll see chalks there as well, but I’d save those for a different
lesson. http://www.metmuseum.org/connections/quiet
Maybe play some quitet music and have them think of a color the music makes them feels and
use that on their paper. Or have them think of a scene that they like to think of when they need
to sleep or calm down—is it an ocean, woods or room in their home?
Quiet can be achieved by looking at
paintings. We see this in Chinese landscape
paintings or in a scence in a city office
isolated form the city. Students can relate
to hushed quiet in a winter scene possibly.
Have them think of how quiet it might be
with few animals scurrying about as many
are hibernating.
Figure 2
Winter Yosemite Valley, 1933-34
Ansel Adams
Gelatin silver print
© Ansel Adams Publishing Trust
2.
Have students discuss how Rothko’s and Friedrich’s paintings can be compared. (Last slides in
PowerPoint.) I would not go into the deepest darkest ideas of the one reviewer, but you can see
how the colors create a somber mood and discuss that.
In his 1961 article "The Abstract Sublime", originally published in ARTnews, the art historian
Robert Rosenblum drew comparisons between the Romantic landscape paintings of both
Friedrich and Turner with the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko. Rosenblum
specifically describes Friedrich's 1809 painting The Monk by the Sea, Turner's The Evening Star
and Rothko's 1954 Light, Earth and Blue as revealing affinities of vision and feeling. According to
Rosenblum, "Rothko, like Friedrich and Turner, places us on the threshold of those shapeless
infinities discussed by the aestheticians of the Sublime. The tiny monk in the Friedrich and the
fisher in the Turner establish a poignant contrast between the infinite vastness of a pantheistic
God and the infinite smallness of His creatures. In the abstract language of Rothko, such literal
detail—a bridge of empathy between the real spectator and the presentation of a
transcendental landscape—is no longer necessary; we ourselves are the monk before the sea,
standing silently and contemplatively before these huge and soundless pictures as if we were
looking at a sunset or a moonlit night."
Caspar David Freidrich - Monk By The Sea [c.1808]
[Oil on canvas, 110 x 171.5 cm]
Friedrich worked for two years on this, ultimately his most famous work. The composition is
divided horizontally into land, sea, and sky with a clear simplicity that shocked his
contemporaries. A monk stands, bareheaded, on the shore. Seagulls circle around him. The
lonely figure faces the leaden blackness of the immeasurably vast sea. The grey band of cloud
over the water surprisingly gives way to blue sky along the top edge of the picture. No artistic
composition had ever been as uncompromising as this: the main space of the picture seems like
an abyss of some kind; there are no boundaries, there is nothing to hold on to, just a sense of
floating between night and day, between despair and hope. In 1810 Heinrich von Kleist put into
words, as no other could, the magical fascination of this painting: “Nothing could be more
sombre nor more disquieting than to be placed thus in the world: the one sign of life in the
immensity of the kingdom of death, the lonely center of a lonely circle. With its two or three
mysterious objects the picture seems somehow apocalyptic, like Young’s Night Thoughts, and
since its monotony and boundlessness are only contained by the frame itself, contemplation of
this picture gives one the sense that one’s eyelids have been cut away.”
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 – 1851) –
The Evening Star, ca. 1830
Oil on canvas, 91.1 x 122.6 cm
The title is not Turner's own, but is taken from some lines of Turner's verse scribbled in a
sketchbook used in 1829-30. Turner was deeply interested in such transitional moments in
nature: the evening star first appears in daylight and is soon supplanted by the stronger light of
the moon. Here the pale point of the star is barely discernible in the sky, but is reflected clearly
in the sea; in both places the star consists of thickly applied white paint.
In the foreground is a boy with a shrimping net and a small leaping dog. The painting is
generally regarded as a study of the effects of light and atmosphere, rather than a finished work.
Light, Earth and Blue, 1954
Oil on canvas, 75 3/8 x 67 in. (191.5 x 170.2 cm)
Mark Rothko (1903 –1970)
Rothko largely abandoned conventional titles in 1947, sometimes resorting to numbers or colors
in order to distinguish one work from another. The artist also now resisted explaining the
meaning of his work. "Silence is so accurate," he said, fearing that words would only paralyze
the viewer's mind and imagination.
In late 1935, Rothko joined with Ilya Bolotowsky, Ben-Zion, Adolph Gottlieb, Lou Harris, Ralph
Rosenborg, Louis Schanker and Joseph Solman to form "The Ten" (Whitney Ten Dissenters),
whose mission (according to a catalog from a 1937 Mercury Gallery show) was "to protest
against the reputed equivalence of American painting and literal painting." Rothko's style was
already evolving in the direction of his renowned later works, yet, despite this newfound
exploration of color, Rothko turned his attention to another formal and stylistic innovation,
inaugurating a period of surrealist paintings influenced by mythological fables and symbols. He
was earning a growing reputation among his peers, particularly among the group that formed the
Artists' Union.
In 1936, Rothko began writing a book, never completed, about similarities in the art of children
and the work of modern painters. According to Rothko, the work of modernists, influenced by
primitive art, could be compared to that of children in that "child art transforms itself into
primitivism, which is only the child producing a mimicry of himself." In this manuscript, he
observed that "the fact that one usually begins with drawing is already academic. We start with
color."
Rothko was using fields of color in his aquarelles and city scenes, and his subject matter and
form at this time had become non-intellectual.
Rothko's work matured from representation and mythological subjects into rectangular fields of
color and light, that later culminated – or self-destructed – in his final works for the Rothko
Chapel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rothko
As my own personal note, it is sometimes hard for a museum visitor to grasp why two block of
color are so important. They may say, “Why I can do that!” Sure they could make two blocks of
color. Possibly even look just like this. But in their study of art where did those colors come
from, what is it expressing? Rothko didn’t start with blocks of color. His artistic life began much
earlier. It was when he began to explore colors that we see this simplistic look at what emotions
can be evoked by such simple canvases.