Caspar David Friedrich, The Sad Silence of Wild Nature | culture

The painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) created what is perhaps the most famous image of Romanticism: Walking on the sea of ​​clouds, from 1817. It shows a man standing on a rocky peak with his back to the observer. In front of him, a huge abyss stretched towards an endless horizon of mist and steep peaks.

This solitary individual bravely venturing into the wilderness and the unknown has been interpreted as a symbol of the search for…

The painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) created what is perhaps the most famous image of Romanticism: Walking on the sea of ​​clouds, from 1817. It shows a man standing on a rocky peak with his back to the observer. In front of him, a huge abyss stretched towards an endless horizon of mist and steep peaks.

This solitary individual bravely venturing into the wild and unknown wilderness has been interpreted as a symbol of the search for knowledge, freedom, and connection with nature. In addition to being the figurative essence of the romantic spirit, Walking It has become a popular culture icon, having multiple versions in art, advertising and social networks.

This desire to connect with nature is the common denominator in the ambitious retrospective Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age, organized by the Hamburger Kunsthal in Hamburg, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich, the German Romantic painter par excellence. It brings together, for the first time in decades, most of his great masterpieces in 60 paintings and 100 drawings.

Friedrich marked the history of art with his innovative concept of landscape: he meticulously studied every element of nature, and then recombined them to achieve compositions of intense expression. “This makes nature appear in a special way: convincing and realistic down to the smallest detail, but at the same time with a dense and meaningful atmosphere,” says historian and exhibition curator Johannes Greif, from Germany’s Friedrich Schiller University. . Jenna.

The exhibition allows you to contemplate Friedrich’s extraordinary creations: moonlit twilights, ominous gray skies over turbulent seas, majestic fjords and majestic mountains; They are all breathtaking places, with an atmosphere of strange, disturbing silence.

Friedrich was born in the German city of Greifswald on the Baltic Sea coast, trained as an artist in Copenhagen and settled in Dresden. With a melancholy nature, he lived through the emergence of the Romantic movement at the end of the eighteenth century, the progress of which spread rapidly throughout Europe and America. The new rebellious spirit reacted against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. In the face of increasing technology and the standardization of society, the Romantics promoted a return to primitive nature and the uniqueness of individuality. They longed to experience undomesticated natural forces, preferring emotion to reason.

On the Baltic island of Rügen, which was beginning to become a tourist destination and which he himself visited several times on foot in the spring of 1801, Friedrich began to paint landscapes that moved away from traditional motifs. But it was particularly towards the end of the decade when he achieved one of his first masterpieces that earned him huge success: Monk by the sea, from 1808-10. Its radical composition arranged in three horizontal lines, of beach, sea and sky, impressed the audience. And to King Frederick William III, who rushed to buy it.

Its extreme simplicity and abstraction, the isolation of the small human figure and the sheer prominence of nature, have made it, for some experts, a precursor to Abstract Expressionism. “It is the great explosion of Romanticism,” sums up historian Florian Ellis of the painting, in his recent biography of the painter, Zuber der stil (The magic of silence).

This exceptional oil painting, one of the exhibition’s signature loans, also has one of the characteristics that would define Friedrich’s art: people with their backs turned to the viewer (rockinvision, in German) who are engrossed in contemplation of the landscape. These figures, represented as observant observers, fill some of the painter’s most distinguished paintings, e.g hunter in the forest, For the year 1813, and walker, From 1817.

As a good romantic, Friedrich filters the scene through his free creative imagination to arouse deep emotions. “It is a great virtue, perhaps the greatest that an artist can do, when he touches the soul and arouses thoughts, emotions and feelings in the observer, even if they are not his own,” Friedrich wrote in his book. Notes.

Although his iconography is very German – mountains and crosses – Friedrich manages to connect with all audiences, as Alexander Klar, director of Hamburger Kunsthal, highlights in a conversation with El Pais: “If you ignore this Germanness, you will realize that many of its features The landscape is completely devoid of people and at the same time it is a reflection of man; “It speaks a universal language.” Klar emphasizes the exceptional nature of the exhibition: such a density of works would not have been possible to bring together for many years “and perhaps it will not be possible to do it again for years.” Many others.”

In 1823, the artist painted another of his wonderful paintings: Ice sea. Friedrich shows a large block of rough ice. Once again, nature imposes itself on humans, whose futile efforts are symbolized by the hull of a ship that capsized and sank in the ice. The oil painting has been interpreted as a romantic warning about the futility of human audacity in trying to control the natural environment.

Friedrich was a successful painter, whose clients included members of the courts of Prussia and Thuringia and the Tsar of Russia, and who had some influence among contemporary artists. Although Goethe considered him too obscure, his work languished for more than half a year. Century. Century. Even a retrospective in Berlin in 1906 revived interest in the legacy of the great Romantic painter, and the twentieth-century avant-garde later demanded it. The Third Reich devoted his work as a defender of Germanism, although Hitler had his doubts: he did not know whether his landscapes were lifting up the German spirit, or rather weakening it a little, Ellis writes.

The fascination generated by Friedrich’s fabrics to this day is evident in the second part of the exhibition, which brings together contemporary artists who have been inspired by his work, such as Hiroyuki Masuyama, Elena Brodros, and Olafur Eliasson. The Hamburg exhibition is the main image of the Caspar David Friedrich Festival, which will include two further exhibitions on specific aspects of his work in 2024: at the Old National Gallery, in Berlin, and at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, in Dresden. After that, the exhibition will also travel to New York, to the Metropolitan Museum, Klar says.

At the moment, Friedrich’s Year is already spreading through the streets of the Hanseatic city, filled with posters announcing the fair, of course, with Walker On an eye-catching red background as an attraction. Even a popular hamburger restaurant dedicated a menu to the romantic painter. In the Portuguese Quarter, between the Elbe River and the red light district, there is also a large urban mural with the figure painted for the occasion by Australian artist Fintan Magee. Germany thus pays tribute to the painter who best conveyed the power and emotion of the Romantic spirit through a legacy that remains valid in popular culture in the 21st century.