The exhibition “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature” will run at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11.
After a long day of hiking, you’ve finally reached the top of the mountain. Tired, thirsty, but exhilarated by your accomplishment, you set your walking stick at your side and look around. But instead of the glorious alpine view that you were expecting, all you see are a few rocky crags jutting out above the fog like inexperienced swimmers who are just barely managing to keep their heads above the water. Further off in the distance, another windswept peak looms, even higher and more imposing than the one you’ve just scaled. You rest for another minute before deciding that you must conquer it too, not understanding why but knowing that something deep within your being is calling you toward it — a persistent inner voice that began as a whisper but has since grown into a roar. You pick your walking stick back up, breathe in the fresh, reinvigorating heaven-kissed air, and brace yourself for the next leg of your journey.
This is the scene that the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich lets us enter into in his iconic 1818 oil masterpiece Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. Because the wanderer’s back is turned to us, and because of the way he’s positioned directly in front of us as he looks out onto the gray-blue landscape, we are led to see the world through his eyes, as if he’s our avatar in a first-person shooter game. Friedrich’s evocative depiction of the strong-willed searcher as he pursues his solitary quest in a soaring, sublime setting helped make Wanderer the emblematic painting of Romanticism, the 18th-19th century artistic movement that reacted to the Enlightenment’s cool rationality by reasserting the centrality of the senses and emotions. Wanderer’s permanent home is in Hamburg, Germany, but his restless spirit has impelled him to move on once again, this time to New York. Wanderer, along with 75 other works, will be on view for the next two months at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s magnificent “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature” exhibit, the first comprehensive Friedrich show to be held in the United States.
Friedrich was born in 1774 in northeast Germany. After enduring a traumatic childhood during which he witnessed the deaths of three of his siblings, he began studying art at the University of Greifswald, his native city, and later at the renowned Academy of Copenhagen. He moved back to Germany in 1798 and settled in Dresden, ready to begin his artistic career. But instead of placing human beings at the center of his compositions, as so many of his artistic predecessors had done, Friedrich focused on landscapes. Like the Romantic poets William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich believed that there was something divine about nature, and he dedicated himself to depicting its spiritual qualities. The Romantics believed that nature had a soul, and they were determined to produce the kind of moody, meditative art that would allow their readers and viewers to sense its universal spirit — and perhaps even commune with it. The paintings, drawings, and sketches on display in “The Soul of Nature” may very well make you feel that nature does, indeed, have a soul. In paintings such as Greifswald in Moonlight (1815-17), Coastal Landscape in Morning Light (1817), and the breathtaking Moonrise over the Sea (1822), Friedrich renders nature as a transcendent, awe-inspiring force that eclipses and commands everything around it, like a high-spiraling Gothic cathedral towering over the other buildings on the block. Nowhere is this more evident than in Monk by the Sea (1808-10), in which a black-robed clergyman is staring out into the infinite abyss of the midnight blue sea.
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But just as we’re on the verge of getting lost amid these overwhelming elemental forces, Friedrich brings us back to Romanticism’s other great subject — the self. For the Romantics, our subjective experience of the world is just as important as the objective thing itself. As Friedrich wrote, “The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him.” Friedrich’s paintings alternate between stunningly beautiful sunsets, haunting castle ruins, ghostly cemeteries, and intensely atmospheric seascapes, for as much as Friedrich is portraying nature, he is also painting the changing seasons within his own heart.
The Romantic quest can be a lonely one, as Wanderer makes clear. But it does not have to be utterly companionless. Two Men Contemplating the Moon may not draw as much attention as Wanderer will, but it possesses a surprising power of its own. An oil painting from 1825-30 on loan from the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden, like Wanderer, its figures are also shown to us only from behind — Friedrich was fond of painting rückenfiguren, German for “figures seen from the back.” Unlike Wanderer, however, there are two human subjects in the image, not one: A teacher and his disciple, standing in a forest cleft between a mossy boulder and an upturned tree. A cantaloupe-colored moon is hanging low in the twilight sky. The tree’s twisted roots, as long and as gnarled as Nosferatu’s fingers, are extending themselves toward the teacher-student pair as if beckoning them to join it in its uncanny state. But they do not appear to care — they would rather stare serenely at the full autumnal moon. We don’t know what they’re discussing, perhaps art, philosophy, or maybe even baseball. Or, maybe like the weathered old fisherman speaking to his faithful disciple Manolin in The Old Man and the Sea, this teacher is telling his student that although he may not be as strong as he once was, he still knows many tricks, and he still has the resolve to continue his journey as far as it will take him.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America.