Caspar David Friedrich: “the most solitary of the solitary”

First time I saw “The Wanderer”, CD Friedrich’s masterpiece, it was on the front cover of Nietzsche’s book “Thus spoke Zaratustra”. At the time I had no idea who Friedrich was, but the painting inspired me to find out more about it and the painter.

Not only I got to know more about the painter and the picture, I was also fortunate to visit the Hamburger Kunsthalle and see the painting.

CD Friedrich was born in 1774 in the town of Greifswald on the Baltic Sea in what was at the time Swedish Pomerania.

CD Friedrich is a par excellence romantic painter, quite possibly the most prominent German romantic painter, and it would not be an exaggeration to call him a “landscape painter”.

I would like to explain what I mean by this term.

The natural world is preeminent in the romantic school.

Humans are inhabiting the natural world and strive to control it, but this is a futile effort.

CD Friedrich depicted the natural world as such.

Humans are supplementing the image, rather than being in the center of it.

They are also small, almost miniscule, as can be seen in the drawings, immersed in the vastness of the natural world.

In the most famous of CD Friedrich’s painting, the “Wanderer”, Man is on top of the World, or so he appreas to be. He is alone. In all of CD Friedrich’s “serious” paintings, Man is alone.

The Wanderr’s posture is erect, stable, firm, the world appears to be his to rule. This is a solitary figure though. This man faces greatness alone. The encounter with greatness requires solitude.

But we can only his back. His face is not seen. This creates ambivalence. The picture may not be as straightforward as we thought at the beginning. If we look closely at the area around the neck, there is an angle, the man is looking down. Is it possible that he has reached the top of the world and as he gazes down he is no longer sure that his reaching the top is as important as he initially thought it would be?

In the 1930s the Nazis used CD Friedrich’s work to promote their World View and he, post mortem, was tarred by an association that has nothing to do with his paintings. This had an unintended consequence: bringing together CD Friedrich and Anselm Kiefer (born in 1945) on the theme of the wanderer.

“The Wanderer” came alive in one image, where Anselm Kiefer, one of the most prominent contemporary German figurative artists is photographed from the back against the backdrop of the sea, much like in CD Friedrich’s painting.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with the past”) has been the dominant theme in German intellectual life since the early 1960s.

In 1969, during a trip through Switzerland, France, and Italy, Kiefer staged a series of photographic self-portraits called Occupations, in which he dressed in paramilitary clothes and struck a pose that imitated Hitler in various natural and monumental settings.

Three histories converge in a single photograph: the early nineteenth century, the 1930s, and the time of the work’s making in the late 1960s. For Kiefer, understanding history begins with its invocation, restaging, or excavation.

The Wanderer may be the most famous of CD Friedrich’s paintings, but the Monk by the Sea is the one I like the most.

The Monk is but one little dot on the big canvas. He is alone.

The Sea is pitch dark, the sky is dark, grey, hazy, with touches of cyan, the Earth is barren, there is no tree or even a bush to be seen. Contrast this to the drawings of Spring, Summer and Autumn.

By 1820, Friedrich was living as a recluse. His friends called him “the most solitary of the solitary”. He died in relative poverty in Dresden in 1840. He was 66 years old.

Sources

21 Facts about Caspar David Friedrich, By Kira Gurmail-Kaufmann. Sotheby’s 19th Century European Paintings, Nov 21, 2018

Anselm Kiefer (born 1945), By Ian Alteveer, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2008