Exhibition Tour — Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature | Met Exhibitions

Kasper David Friedrich wrote, The artist's task is not the faithful representation of air, water, rocks, and trees, but rather his soul, his sensations should be reflected in them. The task of a work of art is to recognize the spirit of nature and, with one's whole heart and intention, to saturate oneself with it and absorb it, and give it back again in the form of a picture. Kasper David Friedrich's paintings draw you in. They can absorb you. They are open for interpretation. You project yourself, your own feelings, your own emotions into these paintings. Your emotions start to wander, and I think that's something that's utterly contemporary. Kasper David Friedrich, The Soul of Nature, is a major exhibition on probably the most important German artist. It is indeed the very first major exhibition of Kasper David Friedrich in the United States that we are showing here at the Met. We've been able to do that because of the enormous support of our colleagues and institutions who hold major works by Kasper David Friedrich, and it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these works outside of Germany in this kind of constellation. Although Friedrich worked almost 200 years ago, in the early 19th century, and in Germany, I think there's also an element of Friedrich's landscapes meeting the moment. He worked at a period of intense self-reflection and of keen awareness of our relationship with the natural world, and I think that we are in a similar moment now, and his works offer us an opportunity to reflect, both in an individual way but also in a communal way, on the fragility of our relation to the environment. Having this opportunity to go back in time to this moment where that kind of consciousness is beginning, and to an artist who creates, in visual form, these deep meditations on what nature is, what it can be, what it means to us, is really powerful. Here he is, Kasper David Friedrich, at just about 25 years of age, just at the very beginning of his career. He is born in the town of Greifswald, in the north of what is now Germany, in 1774. He then settles in Dresden, a flourishing art center in the region of Saxony. There are romantic ideas circulating, so these ideas about subjectivity, perception, autonomy, and of course about the connection between the self and the natural world. He's really still searching for his path as an artist, so he's making depictions of literary subjects, he's making portraits, but what we see in this early work is his incredible powers of observation. So he's obviously looking at himself in a mirror, studying the architecture of his face, using a very sharp piece of chalk, and if you look closely, there are little windows or perhaps crosses in the highlights of his eyes. And he's also called attention to his own hand by using so many different types of marks and mark making to create his likeness, this very fine detailed handling of his hair and of his eyes, the shadows on his face, and then the much looser, more energetic handling in his jacket. To me, this is a drawing where we really sense the young artist learning how to express himself. He's discovering himself here on paper. After Friedrich's first few years in Dresden, he hits on a medium and an approach to landscape that he continues to pursue for the next few years, and that is ink wash applied over paper and landscapes that are evocative of feeling, of spirituality. He begins to exhibit works like this at the Academy in Dresden, and they make quite a splash. And so it's really with these works that we see here that Friedrich first makes his name as a professional artist. And this example is a spectacular drawing. It is a view of Arcona, the northernmost point on the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea. The sky is darkening, but we can still see the clouds illuminated by the last rays of the sun. And this ink wash is really the perfect medium for dusk, for sunset and moonrise, because this is the time of day when everything goes dark and you can no longer discern color. And Friedrich captures these incredibly subtle tonal gradations in the sky, but also the foreground. It appears dark, but there's actually so much detail. And then, of course, that moon of romantic emblem, of longing, of renewal, illuminating the water. And this drawing is such a beautiful example of Friedrich's ability to use landscape elements to suggest, but not dictate, a narrative, an emotion, an experience that we might have in nature. It's achingly beautiful. This gallery is called Nature and Faith. And in this gallery, we see some of Friedrich's first oil paintings. He depicts mountainside crosses and crucifixes and religious ruins that are found in the German landscape. Friedrich makes these works at a very tumultuous period. It's the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, which engulfed German lands and created a great deal of uncertainty and enormous upheaval. And in this moment, Friedrich depicts these religious symbols of suffering, of sacrifice, and of consolation. And Friedrich's works speak to what was, at that moment, a really pivotal cultural question, which was the human relationship to God and to divinity. Was divinity something that resided in the totality of nature? Or was the natural world the book of God, something that could be read and experienced and interpreted alongside scripture? And these were really fundamental questions. The idea that a landscape could contain the type of profound meanings that were previously communicated through figural painting challenged the idea of what landscape painting could be. This is one of Friedrich's most important paintings, Monk by the Sea. We see the tiny figure of a monk staring into the distance at the dark clouds, at the place where we can barely discern that those clouds meet the sea. And so, Max, do you remember the first time that you saw this picture in person? I remember I was with my father in Berlin, and we looked at the painting. I think I was 12 years old. You immediately get it, you're drawn into it, and it has not only the atmosphere, but it also has a certain kind of momentum. There's something happening there, right? And you immediately connect with that spirit. And one sees how daring Caspar de Ruyt Friedrich was with the emptiness of this painting, actually, the openness, the lack, actually, of motif. And with it, the ability to keep it very accessible. So many people probably project so many different things into that painting. And so I think it really works as a poem in a visual way that draws you deeper, deeper. And every time you come there, you have a different, almost like sensibility and a different way of responding to it. And that is extraordinary in a time period when painting is really supposed to tell a story or supposed to tell people how to feel. And to leave that open to the individual is radical. It's also conceptual work in the sense that he landed on this emptiness only through a process. Because initially, he actually had some other motifs there as well. He had ships. Then he kind of kept reducing. Towards the end of his life, when he really starts articulating his artistic philosophy in writing, he talks about that simplicity, that reduction of detail, and says that landscape paintings should leave space for the imagination to play. But you see it here in this breakthrough work. And we have to remember that, you know, Friedrich's viewers were looking at this without having seen an abstract painting. And so to see a work that was so much given over to color and to brushwork and to light was really striking and challenging. And it's kind of at the beginning of a whole trajectory, if you think about it art-historically. You have this painting, but then, of course, late William Turner paintings, and then, of course, Color Field painting, where I think about Mark Rothko. All of this is already in there, right? It stands at the beginning of a whole development of modern art, modernism, but actually also about how to create a very atmospheric, abstract painting. After 1815 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, there's a shift in Friedrich's art. Away from overt religious symbolism and towards imagery that is more generally spiritually evocative. And one of the themes that emerges in his art at this time is home and away, this dialogue between the familiar, the everyday, and things that are distant, mysterious, the realm of travel, of exploration, and of longing. And in Friedrich's art, these two ideas, home and away, aren't separate and opposed. His work explores how they intersect. And one of the most beautiful examples of that is Moonrise Over the Sea. Friedrich paints this work in 1822, and it depicts three people, two women and a man, seated on an enormous boulder on a shore, looking out over the moonlit water. There's a beautiful word in German, Fernweh, which is the idea of longing for distance, yearning for something that we might not ever be able to reach. And I think the figures in this painting really channel that emotion. At the same time, the ships are coming into harbor. And so there's a wonderful interweaving in this painting of the joy of homecoming and this yearning for distant experience. And if you think about what it must have been like during the war years, as the Napoleonic Wars are raging through Europe, how difficult it must have been to travel, whether to new places or to go home for many, and how that experience of longing was one that Friedrich himself and his contemporaries very much experienced. But then there's also a temporal element as well, the sense that the horizon also alludes to the future, whether the hereafter, life after death, or future generations. And there's a kind of push and pull, I think, between the present, the past, and what lies beyond. This gallery is called Nature Cycles, and it's dedicated to Friedrich's interest in the passage of time. He is thinking about the age of the earth and the place of human history within that. And so he returns to the motif of ruins in this period and depicts centuries-old structures that have dilapidated over time, overtaken by nature, by trees and overgrowth. And then, of course, he is very interested in winter as a time of year that brings together ideas of death and rebirth. And that also is just so visually spectacular in terms of the subtleties of color and light. These two pictures are a pair, spruce trees in the snow and bushes in the snow. Friedrich exhibited them together in 1828, and a critic at that time had a response to these, which is that Friedrich has chosen two completely unremarkable subjects. But Friedrich has made these subjects special, has caught our attention through his own attentiveness. He's depicted each needle, each twig with its own coating of snow, and he's arranged these objects so that they fill the picture plane, they fill our view, and they become, despite their small size, monumental. The work on the left comes from Munich, and the work on the right comes from Dresden. So normally they live in completely different parts of Germany, and it's very special to be able to reunite them here on our wall. This gallery is dedicated to the motif of mist and mountains. Mountains were newly embraced by the Romantics as sites where one could encounter beauty, danger, and the immense power and age of the earth. And Friedrich really distinguished himself by his powers of observation, his attention to detail. Friedrich often amplified the solidity and the sense of age of his mountains by juxtaposing them with mist. And so we see these solid forms of the mountains, and then all around them, these evanescent passing clouds. And so looking at his pictures, one would channel the sense of an earth that was immensely old, but was also subject to much shorter cycles of the natural world. This is the most iconic work by Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, painted around 1817, so the midpoint of his career. And it encapsulates the idea of the sublime, this romantic concept of an experience of being in nature that is at once dangerous and a little scary, but also incredibly beautiful and exhilarating. Do you remember the first time you saw this painting in person? I have to say that I don't know, because the reality is you've seen it so often before you even see it, because it's been endlessly reproduced. For a lot of people, it's actually the solid speaker, because it's so vast and open, and the Rückenfigur, the figure that you see from the back, you almost project yourself onto it, so you actually expect the painting to be bigger, because it has such visual power and might. Quite literally, it is a textbook example of romanticism. He brings together these oppositions in his works, so it's an intimate painting about an experience of vastness and grandeur. It's a painting both about this desire to know the world, but also the ultimate unknowability of the world. I love the wind blowing through his hair, and that scale, it makes it somehow accessible. I think this is a picture that has indirectly informed how most of us take vacation photos, and there's something that seems so natural about it. It's about uncertainty. It's kind of the question, where do we go from here, or where do I go from here? So it can be applied to all sorts of sentiments, individual as well as for a nation. This portion of the exhibition is called Clarity of Vision, and it captures a really key moment in Friedrich's career. Public taste is shifting in this period, in the early 1830s, away from his evocative, emotional landscapes. But Friedrich really sticks to his principles in this period. He even writes that landscape painting shouldn't have too much detail. One shouldn't try to cram too much into a composition. Instead, he really captures that essence, that spirit of nature, that soul in his works in this period. At this point in Friedrich's career, we can see the skill and confidence that he has gained with color and with light. A master class of subtle transitions of color that seem to glow from within. We conclude with The Great Beyond, this ensemble of ink wash drawings and one oil painting that Friedrich made in the last five years of his life. I think we can see from the works in this room that his creative drives never diminish. In these years, he returns to ink wash as his primary creative vehicle. And so this is the medium with which he really launched his career some 30 years earlier, working now on a smaller, more intimate scale and creating works that are even more poignant, more reduced in detail. Here we have a beautiful drawing from Hamburg, Moonrise by the Sea, possibly one of the very last works Friedrich ever made. There's no figure, there are no boats, no signs of human activity whatsoever. It could even be a kind of primordial landscape any time in the Earth's history. We can see the pencil lines with which Friedrich has drawn some of the rocks and they're a little bit broken. They're meant to be visible and it creates a kind of softness that helps convey the sense of diminishing light. To me, these late drawings of seashore reveal Friedrich's gift for creating something poetic out of an incredibly small number of elements. Rocks, water, light, sky. To invite the viewer into the scene and into our own contemplation, both of the drawing and I think beyond that, to imagine ourselves in this position in the natural world. Friedrich himself said that he would consider it a great achievement if people, including future generations, got from his works feelings and ideas quite different from his own. And so I think that's a kind of invitation and encouragement to all visitors to come in with an open mind and let their imaginations wander and feel what they feel. And I also hope that it offers a window onto this fascinating period of history, this romantic era and the birth of these ideas about nature and the self that are very much still with us today. Putting together this exhibition, I was so struck by how attentively and with such intensity Friedrich looked at nature. Friedrich found so much in even the smallest aspects of the natural world and his art reminds us how much there is to discover.