The Veiled Gaze - Caspar David Friedrich

When Bambi hops through Walt Disney's mist-veiled spruce forests, few viewers suspect that these dreamlike landscapes owe their inspiration to a red-haired, shy painter from Pomerania: Caspar David Friedrich. Disney drew inspiration for "Bambi" from Friedrich's paintings such as "Morning Mist in the Mountains" and "Rocky Gorge."

With red hair, pale skin, and sky-blue eyes, Caspar David Friedrich himself looked like a figure from his mystical landscape paintings. The path to his revolutionary style was anything but straightforward.

At the academies in Copenhagen and Dresden, the shy student was regularly ridiculed. His human figures always had legs that were too long, arms that were too long, sagging torsos. Life drawing became particularly torturous for him - he found it shameful to look at naked women and thought to himself: "If they were trees, I could paint them better."

And he would prove himself right. So he turned to landscape painting and developed a completely unique style.

He drew his inspiration from hours-long walks and hikes that he always undertook alone: in Dresden along the Elbe when the landscape was still shrouded in mist, but also in his Pomeranian homeland around Greifswald, in Neubrandenburg, on Rügen, in Stralsund, and in Saxon Switzerland. "I must remain alone and know that I am alone to fully see and feel nature," he once wrote. "I must surrender myself to what surrounds me. Unite myself with my clouds and rocks to be what I am." Unlike other artists of his time who were drawn to Italy, Friedrich never left Germany.

Friedrich hated heat - the air could never be cold enough for him. In a fur coat that he had received as a gift from his brother Heinrich, he undertook extensive walks even at minus twenty degrees. When he came home, frost would fall from his coat and ice from his red beard - yet the next morning he would be drawn out into the cold again. "When a region shrouds itself in mist, then it appears larger, more sublime, heightens the imagination and creates expectation like a veiled maiden," he wrote. The man who shied away from direct gazes became the master of the suggested, the veiled.

Friedrich invented the famous "back figure" - people who turn their backs to the viewer while looking into the landscape. Thus he made us all participants in his meditative contemplation of nature. His paintings never arose directly in nature, but from memory in his Dresden studio. Observation became imagination.

His studio was a lively place: the door always stood open, visitors could come in at any time. Friedrich once wrote in a letter that Russian, French, and English were spoken there simultaneously. Yet the room was of Spartan simplicity - spotlessly clean and completely empty except for an easel and a single chair. Friedrich placed great value on cleanliness and order. On the bare wall hung only three objects on a nail: a triangle, a ruler, and a T-square with which he could calculate the golden ratio. He generously offered his one chair to guests while he himself stood. Friedrich loved to talk about his art and naturally also hoped to sell a painting or two.

There was one exception, however: when he painted clouds, no one was allowed to disturb him. His wife would then explain to visitors: "Now one must not disturb him, painting the sky is like divine service for him." For Friedrich, clouds were more than weather phenomena - they veiled the divine and made its presence bearable for humans. "The noble person (painter) recognizes God in everything, the common person (also a painter) sees only the form, not the spirit."

After his death in 1840, Friedrich fell into oblivion for almost a hundred years until the Expressionists rediscovered him.

Today, Caspar David Friedrich ranks among the most significant artists of Romanticism and created one of the most influential visual languages in art history.

He himself summarized his nature in a small poem:

You call me a misanthrope,
Because I avoid society.
You err,
I love it.
But in order not to hate people,
I must avoid their company.

B.