Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) did not like exhibitions. Why would anyone think that putting different works, by different painters, in the same room, would be a great idea? Next to other, perhaps showier pictures, the canvas that seemed so luminous on its own would fade, Friedrich worried in his late essay “Observations on Viewing a Collection of Paintings”. He preferred to display his new works by themselves, inviting friends and colleagues to inspect them when they were finished, without any distractions, in his darkened studio. The most interesting thing about a painting, for Friedrich, was not what it represented, but the unique immersive experience it enabled, a transcript of the vision that had created it.
Now, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of his birth, Friedrich is getting exhibitions galore—two substantial ones in Berlin and Hamburg took place earlier this year, and others are opening, or about to open, in Dresden, Greifswald and Weimar, while a full-scale show (the first such in the United States) is planned for February 2025 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Friedrich’s works are travelling farther than he ever did.
Glorious dedication
While Friedrich would not have objected to exhibitions dedicated to his work only, I bet he would have been even happier about the two catalogues now released in English translations by, respectively, the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin. Sumptuously illustrated and heavier than physics textbooks, Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age and Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes accord plenty of space to the artist’s individual paintings, letting them shine and glow on their own, separate pages.
At the same time, the editors of both these volumes are also interested in touting Friedrich’s general relevance, casting him as a Modernist before his time or a proto-environmentalist, fully aware that what we call “nature” is a deeply human construction. Friedrich was, proposes Johannes Grave, co-editor of Art for a New Age, the perfect artist for the Anthropocene, as our present time is often called, in which humans have left their traces everywhere on the planet.
No excuses
If Infinite Landscapes is best consulted as a smart overview of the artist, Art for a New Age aims for comprehensiveness, supplying detailed mini essays on more than 200 different works. If you still associate Friedrich with only a few stand-out paintings—among them Hamburg’s prize possession, the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (around 1817)—this collection leaves you with no excuses. Consider, for example, Friedrich’s little-known late masterwork Ploughed Field (around 1830, Hamburger Kunsthalle), so unlike the forest, mountain and seaside scenes for which the artist is best known. About half of the painting is taken up by a roughly ploughed, dark field, lined, toward the middle, by a narrow band of meadow and a forlorn-looking parade of trees. While field, meadow and trees seem to descend towards the viewer, that left-to-right diagonal is powerfully offset, in the painting’s upper half, by the sheer weight of the evening sky, a mass of lavender-tinged clouds parting to reveal horizontal bands of yellowish-orange produced by the setting sun, a fading glimpse of a world beyond. If the ploughed field is ready for new life, then the dimming sky points to its end.
Friedrich’s famous Rückenfiguren suggest that the human viewer is not the measure of all things
The people who appear in Friedrich’s paintings are usually turned away from the viewer, as if to tell us how to properly take in the world depicted—Friedrich’s famous Rückenfiguren (back-figures). But in Ploughed Field, the tiny figure of the wanderer, pushed to the left, hints that humans do not matter here. Ploughed Field thus leaves us in that ambivalent, hard-to-define space evoked in other Friedrich landscapes where, to quote Mareike Hennig in Art for a New Age, the viewer is not “the measure of all things”—a reference to Friedrich’s Swans in the Reeds (1819-20, Frankfurter Goethe-Haus). A dark, dimly moon-illuminated pond scene with two barely visible swans tucked away in the water at the bottom, Swans in the Reeds strongly suggests that nature does not need us at all.
Rebellion with reverence
Indeed, the label “artist of the Anthropocene” fits Friedrich only loosely. His work derives its power and moral force precisely from directing us toward a realm that is not art at all and outlasts all efforts to contain it. (Was that one of the reasons Friedrich did not sign his compositions?) Contemporary artists, amply discussed and represented in Art for a New Age, have grasped the mix of rebelliousness and reverence that distinguishes Friedrich’s best work. Their responses are therefore less revisions than provocative acknowledgments of his lingering influence. See the Friedrich-like Rückenfigur in Swaantje Güntzel’s 2021 photographic series Arctic Yoghurt, where we see the artist herself, in a blood-red dress, throwing a small yoghurt cup into the pristine waters of a Norwegian fjord, a gesture both pathetic and surprisingly violent.
A somewhat gentler updating of Friedrich takes place in the work of the Japanese artist Hiroyuki Masuyama, whose painstaking recreations of Friedrich originals in the form of LED light boxes (backlit photographic collages) receive their own section in Infinite Landscapes. Masuyama’s modifications are slight but consequential. In Moonrise over the Sea (2018), the observers have slipped into contemporary dress, sporting hoodies, jeans and sneakers. Which, arguably, is proof not of Friedrich’s modernity but of his timelessness.
Viewing two versions of the same thing side by side, comparing a painting with its copy or later reworkings, may help clarify or, in some instances, complicate a painter’s intentions. Infinite Landscapes excels in presenting such pairings or echoes. Take Friedrich’s two winter landscapes from 1811. In the version at the Staatliches Museum Schwerin, the gnarled trees violently tilting right and left appear to mock the snowbound wanderer, who is also surrounded by an army of tree stumps, an image of utter desolation. In the second at the National Gallery, London, the wanderer has thrown away his crutches and sunk into the snow in prayer. As if in response, the façade of a spectral cathedral rises from the mist behind him. Does the latter version of that scene supersede the former? As Hilmar Frank notes in Infinite Landscapes, the Schwerin painting has “an expressive impulse” that is missing from the London version, where the lines are just too straight, the hope manifested too convenient.
On his death he hoped to go not to heaven but to the moon
Yet Friedrich in his quieter mode can also be remarkably powerful. Infinite Landscapes reprints, in sequence, the three different versions of what was first called Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1819-20). What a pleasure to track the changing configurations of moongazers over the years—first two men, then a woman and man (perhaps Friedrich and his wife Caroline), and then again two men—all ensconced in the same softly lit, overgrown fairytale forest! Friedrich was, I think, only half joking when he once said to a friend, the Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl, that on his death he hoped to go not to heaven but to the moon.
• Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes, by Birgit Verwiebe and Ralph Gleis (eds). Published 14 May/9 July by Prestel, 352pp, 265 colour Illustrations, £45/$60 (hb)
• Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age, by Markus Bertsch and Johannes Grave (eds). Published 25 April/17 September by Thames & Hudson, 496pp, 400 colour illustrations, £50/$65 (hb)