Lost in the Landscape

He never signed a canvas, but he had a signature all the same, one that the most radical of his great oils makes clear. The German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich was in his mid-thirties when he created what’s become known as Monk by the Sea (1808–1810), which from a distance looks like nothing so much as a ragged stack of stripes. There’s a band of grayish white at the bottom, flecked with a brown that turns it all bumpy, and above it a slash of deepest indigo, with a somewhat lighter one layered on top, its edges frayed by what a realist would call wind. Then a torn bolt of blue gray, and sky, and at last a narrow exhilarating line of sapphire. But go back to the bottom—again from a distance, the sixty feet allowed by early morning in an uncrowded gallery—and you’ll see a narrow post on the left that staples that grayish white to the patch of midnight above. It too is indigo, and it almost disappears in the darkness of that upper strip, and then it’s finished off by a thumbnail’s worth of red and yellow.

Walk closer, stepping around the viewers who now begin to gather, and watch as the post resolves into the solitary figure of a man, the long-robed monk of the title, caught from behind so that we cannot see his face. His averted presence lets us know that there are things we cannot know. Heinrich von Kleist described him as a Capuchin when the painting had its first public showing, at the Berlin Academy of Arts in 1810, but that’s surely wrong; he is wearing nothing like that order’s robes of coffee and cream. Scholars have often described the monk as having Friedrich’s own features, and yet how can one tell? All that links him with the painter is a tiny cap of yellow hair, of a kind that’s common in the region around the artist’s birthplace, the old Hanseatic city of Greifswald on the Baltic.

For the monk has no features to see. There’s no face, nothing but an ear the size of a grain of rice, and as a rule Friedrich did not paint full, clear views of nose and mouth and eyes. He did draw them, finely detailed self-portraits in chalk especially; a sheet from around 1810 shows him with muttonchops that stretch down below his jawline. There are no surviving portraits in oil, however, and to my knowledge no record of his having made any; the evidence for his yellow hair lies in the portraits his friends and disciples left of him. In his own paintings people are seen from behind or the side, with the sole exception of another thumbnail, a smudge depicting middle age in the allegorical Stages of Life (circa 1834). Art historians call his preferred pose the Rückenfigur—the figure whose back is to us—and that is Friedrich’s signature; that is what we know him by.

What made him make his subjects turn away? In his wonderfully anecdotal The Magic of Silence the German cultural historian Florian Illies writes that Friedrich was just bad at drawing figures, and that’s why he took up the then-minor genre of landscape. But it can’t be that simple; after all, he could do faces when he wanted to. No, there’s something more, some inscrutable aversion, a motif that amounts to compulsion, a quality of reserve, even of privacy. It’s as though he were shy on their behalf, as if he wanted them to keep their secrets.

We look on from behind while two cloaked and floppy-hatted men stand beneath a tree and contemplate the moon, one of them leaning on the other. Then it’s two women, sisters maybe, with their hair in matching buns, who sit with a man on a seaside boulder. They are high up in the picture plane, but still we seem to peer over their shoulders to see what they do, the moon again, and two sailboats in shadow. A man stands alone on a rocky promontory in Friedrich’s most famous painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (circa 1817). He looks out into the mists of his own mind, and yet his broad back gets in the way of our view; we see him seeing, but we don’t share the entirety of his vision. Nor do we share that of the crucified Christ in The Cross in the Mountains (1807–1808), a landscape masquerading as an altarpiece. He too is turned away from us, looking over the horizon at something our low vantage point keeps hidden, some blessed realm on the other side of the mountain or even death itself.

The Cross in the Mountains has not made the trip to New York, where “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature” is the first major show of his work on this side of the Atlantic. It’s been mounted in honor of his 250th birthday and follows a series of exhibitions last year in Germany, including a much larger one in Hamburg, “Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age.” That show gathered almost all of his major pictures, and though the Met hasn’t been able to match it, its galleries do offer a superb introduction to an artist whose work—luminous, disturbing, serene—remains too little known in North America. Those who have visited the German museums will doubtless miss some of their favorites; that crucifixion has, for example, remained in Dresden, where Friedrich settled in 1798. But the Wanderer has come from Hamburg, and both Monk by the Sea and the extraordinary meadows and mountains of The Watzmann (1824–1825) from Berlin, along with dozens of smaller works from those three cities and throughout Germany. All five of the Friedrich paintings in the United States are here, but none of them could anchor a show like this. What I hadn’t seen before, what won’t be familiar to anyone but specialists, are his astonishing works on paper.

Friedrich’s father was a Greifswald tallow chandler who boiled animal fats down into soap and candles, and Caspar’s life had few outward events. But an early moment doubtless marked him. When he was thirteen he watched as his younger brother died in the broken ice of a skating accident, and that devastating loss may be linked to the regular periods of depression from which he apparently suffered. A few years later he began drawing lessons at the tiny local university and in 1794 went for further training at a Copenhagen art school. Then Dresden, where Saxony’s court culture had created a group of visually sophisticated potential clients. And there he stayed.

In 1818 he married Caroline Bommer, from whose brother’s shop he bought pencils; three of their four children survived. He traveled only on hiking and sketching expeditions into the nearby mountains of Bohemia and back to the coasts and islands of his native region. He never even got as far as the Alps, and his depiction of the Watzmann, a mountain near Berchtesgaden, was instead worked up in the studio from a friend’s watercolors as well as his own drawings of the lower-peaked Harz. That was Friedrich’s usual practice, and despite their photographic precision almost none of his paintings depicts a real place. They are composites drawn from his notebooks, imaginations of an ideal landscape: a scrupulously observed tree from here and a rock from there, a cloud recalled from a decade before, a ruin near Greifswald’s flatlands now set in rolling hills.

In that sense Monk by the Sea is an extreme case. It doesn’t even pretend to refer to some actual bit of beach, and as you back away from it the painting approaches the edge of abstraction. That’s what many scholars have said, and this quality is reinforced by the fact that its horizontal bands make it seem depthless, a picture without a vanishing point.¹ Friedrich worked hard on that, and at a late stage he painted over the two ships whose offshore presence had created an illusion of three-dimensionality. (Their traces show up on infrared photography.) Kleist thought it looked boundless, and wrote that the viewer feels “as if his eyelids had been cut off.” Still, it only approaches abstraction, playing with a possibility that no one yet could quite imagine, and to my eyes remains firmly representational. Maybe it’s the brownish contour lines on the beach; maybe the faint strokes of white that mark the breaking of a wave. Sand and sea and sky—that’s what I notice, at any distance, and the monk is the most abstract element of all, a few lines of paint that nevertheless tie the earth and the water together. Even without him it would be a seascape, but without his littleness, without his facelessness, it would not seem so vast.

The painting is unusual in Friedrich’s oeuvre in that we know exactly where it’s been since it left his studio. Among the spectators at its 1810 unveiling was the teenaged crown prince of Prussia, who later reigned as Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Earlier that year he had lost his mother, Queen Luise, who died from a sudden fever. It broke him, and yet as he walked through the show with his father he felt consoled by the bleakness of the canvas and asked if they could buy it. Illies tells this story and adds that they also bought Abbey in the Oak Wood (1809–1810), which the artist had sent to Berlin as well. That painting has stayed behind in Berlin, at the Alte Nationalgalerie. It shows a ruined church, with a single Gothic window standing, menaced by the trees around it. Friedrich’s palette here is all brown and gray, and there’s an almost indiscernible funeral procession marching through the funk and gloom at the bottom of the canvas. The young prince liked it as well, and the two canvases remained in the royal collections until they joined the national ones. Both have lately been cleaned and restored—a darkness more visible now than ever.

Other major paintings have taken a more circuitous route to their current homes. The Prussian royal purchases were an early high, but Friedrich knew much more about disappointment. Goethe admired the filigree work of his early drawings. He wasn’t so keen on the oils, however, and the painter didn’t help himself by refusing to produce the cloud studies he wanted; the poet even suggested that “one ought to break Friedrich’s pictures over the edge of a table.” The director of the Dresden art school declined his bid for a professorship and left the chair vacant. His pictures dropped from favor and his sales fell, though he did find some patrons in Russia, where the Hermitage now holds the most significant collection of his work outside of Germany.

In 1835 he had a stroke, and while he recovered enough to work, he was almost forgotten when he died five years later. His name and his family’s finances were kept alive by the more successful Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl, who lived in the same Dresden building as Friedrich and among other things bought The Sea of Ice (1823–1824) from his estate—a genuinely frightening look at the Arctic’s frozen teeth, with a ruined ship caught in a jagged waste. The Hamburger Kunsthalle acquired it from Dahl’s descendants in 1905, which ensured that the museum knew exactly what it was getting. But many of Friedrich’s paintings disappeared into the hands of less informed collectors, and since they were unsigned no one could tell who had made them.

That began to change around the time of the Hamburg purchase. A Berlin exhibition in 1906, a celebration of the previous century’s work in the recently unified nation, made the scale of Friedrich’s achievement newly clear and brought many works out of private collections and into public galleries. Yet that raised profile came close to destroying what international reputation he had. He painted mountains and forests, he was good with snow, and he had never been to either Italy or France. His landscapes had no Claudian temples and hardly even a shepherd: they were German landscapes, a celebration of soil and spirit, and he was a German patriot who saw the Napoleonic victories near Dresden in 1813 as both a disaster and a disgrace. The Nazis loved him. The Third Reich even underwrote the publication of the first monograph about him to appear in the United States, and in 1937, Illies writes, Hitler contributed to the purchase price of The Watzmann for the Nationalgalerie. He hoped to hang it in his Berchtesgaden aerie, but the museum held on to it. The Jewish family who sold it has since made a successful claim for restitution and in an act of great generosity has arranged to leave it in the Nationalgalerie.

The Watzmann’s provenance is clear. We know the names of its earliest owners, and that of the Berlin collector—Martin Brunn—who used the proceeds from its sale to get his family to safety. But there is nothing so simple about Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. The picture has been dated to around 1817, but there’s no record of its existence before 1939, when a Berlin gallerist began to hawk it around. Was it too a forced sale? For some years it changed hands regularly, and Illies notes that there was doubt at first about its authenticity. The discovery of Friedrich’s preparatory drawings has long put that worry to rest, and in any case nobody else has ever painted such lilac-hued fog.

The painting entered the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1970, just a few years before a 1974 retrospective underlined the differences between the painter and the uses to which the Nazis had put him. He was indeed a nationalist—and a liberal. The floppy hats worn by so many of his Rückenfiguren are in a style known as Old German and were favored by those who wanted constitutions and representative institutions rather than the autocracy of the region’s princely states, which attempted to ban them. That’s the side Friedrich was on, and he can no more be blamed for the way the Nazis appropriated his work than can his contemporaries, the similarly inclined Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.²

By that time it was almost too late—too late, that is, for the American museums. In the aftermath of World War II, the Met curator Alison Hokanson writes in the exhibition catalog, no public institution on this side of the Atlantic was interested in putting its resources into German art, and once that finally changed there was very little of his work available. It wasn’t until 1984 that the Kimbell in Fort Worth acquired the first of Friedrich’s paintings to hang in the permanent collection of an American museum. That’s what makes the Met’s current show such an opportunity, and yet in listening to the crowds it was clear that many visitors knew his work already.

Or at least they know the Wanderer. A man stands on a stony height and stares out over a valley in which there is no sign of human habitation. Mountains and cliffs rise in the distance, and closer in some fissured butte-like formations, while the wind-stirred mist appears both to lift and drop at once, as if in motion across the canvas. The man is elegantly dressed in a bottle-green suit, and his walking stick is too light to have helped him much in reaching this wild lookout; he’s a tourist, not a hiker, and probably there’s a road and a coach waiting just outside the frame. And yet as he gazes out on this sublime landscape he seems to encapsulate the whole of European Romanticism, every dream and struggle of his time and place.

In consequence the picture provides an all-too-obvious cover image for texts from its period: paperback editions of Frankenstein or even The Count of Monte Cristo. I have seen it, inevitably, on a Deutsche Grammophon release of Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasy and adapted for a 1995 cover of the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel, in which the figure looks out over fifty years of German history at concentration camps and the Berlin Wall alike. Kehinde Wiley has posed a Black model against that landscape as part of his continuing examination of the Western canon, and many contemporary artists have used it as a point of departure for work about the environment; the Hamburg show made space for a number of photographs that set the man down before a dwindling ice field. There’s even a T-shirt, shown in the Met’s catalog, that uses the picture to push the Green New Deal, though that’s still better than its reproduction on a pair of socks that you can buy at the exhibition’s kiosk.

I last saw the Wanderer over twenty years ago in Hamburg, and though I was glad to see it again in New York I found that I liked it a bit less than before. Certainly its overexposure both dulls one’s response and opens it to parody; and then there are the crowds, the thick knot around it on the Sunday afternoon when I first saw the show. I went back the next morning, and for a few minutes I had it to myself, as I did Monk by the Sea, and was able to see it from a distance. That helped explain its popularity: for all the delicacy of Friedrich’s brush, the painting’s design is as simple as a poster. The rock and the man together form a triangle that rises into the sky, and the colors of each are so dark as to approach a silhouette. The image is at once mysterious and clear, and it leaves you to make of those mists what you will.

Friedrich’s work often combined the symbols of Christian reverence with the majesty of the natural world, but his mountaintop crosses and visionary forest cathedrals have never quite held me. His rocks and trees don’t need them; they are numinous enough on their own, though perhaps that’s just how it seems today, two centuries after the painting and poetry of his era taught us to find our cathedrals in nature itself. Still, Illies writes that Friedrich liked to have guests in the studio, except when he was “painting the sky.” That’s how his wife put it, and while it must have been a technically demanding bit of work, she also added that it was “like church to him.”

Those words suggest that the basis of worship was beginning to change. The sky demanded solitude because it could be seen as divine in itself, and despite Friedrich’s undoubted personal piety, recent scholarship has concentrated on the things in his work that are only “like” church, looking not to the spiritual realm but rather to his revelation of an all-encompassing physical one. He loved the night, and the look of the moon on the water, and most of his evening scenes are both happy and calm. A good example is Moonrise Over the Sea (1822), with the two women and a man who watch as the moon climbs through a thin band of purplish cloud, and the soft gray of the sailboats offshore. Those Rückenfiguren sit so high in the picture that they break the line of both sea and sky, which keeps them from being lost in it. Instead they are at home.

Yet we are not everywhere at home. Both Nina Amstutz’s ecocritical Caspar David Friedrich: Nature and the Self (2020) and Joseph Leo Koerner’s foundational Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (1990) take up a pair of oils from 1827–1828 that are known together as From the Dresden Heath. A spruce thicket in the snow; a stand of winter-stripped bushes whose interlaced and impenetrable branches seem a kind of threat. Neither picture shows any trace of the human, and each of them keeps us at a distance. We sense as we look that these trees have an existence and an integrity all their own that has nothing to do with us, nothing to say to us.

That in fact is what they do say, but look closely and you’ll see something marvelous. The curator Joanna Sheers Seidenstein writes in her fine catalog essay on Friedrich’s drawings that his work shows “few if any mannered strokes of the brush, pen, or pencil,” in contrast to that of his contemporary J.M.W. Turner. Instead he “effaced…any hint of mark-making,” and yet with these trees I do see those marks, a hint of the hand in the faintly raised lines of white depicting the way the snow clings to the surface of the branches. The detail is stirring, and no reproduction could capture it. Koerner compares Friedrich to Wordsworth, and he’s not wrong; their worlds both offer an intimation of “something ever more about to be.” But when I look at his pictures of this heath I remember Wallace Stevens’s Snow Man, that figure with a mind of winter, who can listen to the wind without any thought of misery, and see both “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

The Met exhibition seems less a series of rooms than a wide and winding corridor whose right-angled turns bring it repeatedly back upon itself. The walls between its different spaces don’t always rise to the ceiling, allowing you to see what’s coming as you look from one stretch of that hallway to another, and the curators have placed some of the major and also physically larger paintings at the turns. So you round a corner, look down the softly illuminated gallery, and spot The Watzmann waiting at the next bend. Walking through a show like this is a form of procession, and this one is largely chronological. It begins with the works on paper that Friedrich produced in the years around 1800, before he took up oils, but breaks sequence to group a number of smaller pieces on more or less thematic grounds: mountains and meadows, a wall of Gothic arches, a set of coastal scenes. And at the very end, just before you spill into the light of the Petrie Sculpture Court, there is a surprise.

Friedrich may not have been good at human figures, but with rocks and water he was as fine and as imaginative a draftsman as anyone could wish, and he worked especially well in sepia, whose brownish tones come from cuttlefish ink—a new medium in the Dresden of his day. An early double-sheeted drawing shows the moon rising over Rügen Island, a few miles off the coast from Greifswald, with its monochromatic waves appearing to gleam; the trick is done with a few dots of uninked paper. The rocks on the beach look still crisp in shadow, and the two small boats drawn up on the shingle seem to await their owners’ return.

The last works in the show are in sepia as well. They were all finished after his stroke, and his line is now more reliant on wash, a kind of deliberate fuzz that both calms and enthralls. A dolmen balances atop a few small boulders; a cave opens on a granite mountainside in the Harz, and Friedrich pulls our eyes down, down into the earth itself, an image with no hint of sky. The best of them shows him returning to the coasts of his childhood, to stones and saltwater, and again to the moon, a perfect circle on the horizon. There are no boats here, or birds, or anything alive, and the world seems at once newly created and eternal. The water rolls, the night softens the rocks, and even in the near distance their outline fades. Soon the tide will cover them. But for the moment they look as if they could speak, and tell us the things that none of his people can.