Caspar David Friedrich: the Soul of Nature
Metropolitan Museum of Art February 8 - May 11, 2025
Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age
Thames & Hudson/496 pages/$65
For much of his life, and nearly a century afterward, Caspar
David Friedrich's reputation languished in undeserved obscurity. This was true
even in his native land. In the world beyond Germany, he was virtually unknown.
Recently, Friedrich has gained some visual recognition in the English-speaking
nations, based on one, frequently reproduced, painting.
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Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above
a Sea of Fog, 1818
A major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
and an equally impressive book published by Thames & Hudson, Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age, may finally
succeed in establishing the German "mystic with a paintbrush" where he belongs - in the first rank of great
19th century artists.
The phrase "may finally succeed" needs to be emphasized. As the Thames & Hudson book relates, Friedrich and his Wanderer above a Sea of Fog are currently being used to promote awareness of humanity's domination over the natural environment. Wanderer above a Sea of Fog has become the "poster boy" for concern over the Anthropocene.
Some of the contemporary uses of Wanderer testify to sincere concern over our man-made environment, like the image above. Others are notably derivative and self-righteous. None really expresses the core beliefs of Friedrich, who was the last great Christian artist of Europe before secularism drove religion to the margins of cultural discourse.
Let’s hope that The Met exhibition and the Thames & Hudson book will open people's eyes to the true Caspar David Friedrich. It won't be an easy task. Every
time that Friedrich seems to be
gaining the recognition he deserves, Fate is waiting in ambush.
The first turning point in reviving Friedrich’s fortunes was a well-received exhibition in 1906. Later, in the aftermath of World War I, Friedrich’s haunting landscapes and
brooding Rückenfiguren (human figures seen from behind) struck an emotional chord. After decades in the shadows, Friedrich began to attract widespread
popularity in Germany.
Then the malevolent hand of Fate struck again. A catastrophic museum fire in Munich in 1931 destroyed a
number of Friedrich’s greatest paintings.Two years later, a change in
Germany’s government brought an admirer of Friedrich’s work to a position of unparalleled
power. And that was the cruelest misfortune of all.
“I am an artist and not a politician,” Adolf Hitler told a British
diplomat. Der Fuhrer felt that Caspar
David Friedrich was a kindred soul.
Hitler and his Nazi henchmen placed Friedrich high in the pantheon of noble Germanic heroes. One of Friedrich’s signature works, Two Men Contemplating the Moon, 1819-20, of which he painted three versions, was embraced by the Nazis as emblematic of the Nordic “culture” of the Third Reich.
In 2001,The Met purchased the last of these three paintings made notorious by Nazi adulation. The Met's Two Men Contemplating the Moon is one of the very few paintings by Friedrich in a collection outside Germany.
Though he had died nearly a century before Hitler came to power, Caspar David Friedrich was tarred by the brush of Nazi propaganda. It took a long time for Friedrich's Nazi "past" to be forgiven. Germany's leading post-war artist, Anselm Kiefer, underscored Friedrich's guilt by association, posing as the "wanderer above a sea of fog" with his arm raised in the Sieg Heil salute.
As we said, Fate is unfair.
Last year marked the 250th anniversary of Friedrich’s birth. Museums in Germany honored the now-rehabilitated artist with a number of special exhibitions over the course of 2024. The Metropolitan Museum of Art took advantage of the closing of these German tributes to mount a celebratory exhibit of its own, February 8 through May 11. The Met curators brought an impressive selection of Friedrich's works to New York, the greatest ever exhibition to be mounted in the U.S.
The Met's Caspar David Friedrich: the Soul of Nature places the great German painter directly in the culture of his time. The two key, motivating ideals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were "romanticism" and the "sublime." The popular understanding of both terms has shifted over time, with the loss of important elements of meaning as comprehended by Friedrich.
It is vital to our understanding of Friedrich's work to let him explain his own approach to visual expression. The most famous of his quotes on art takes on the character of a manifesto.
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"The painter shall not paint what he sees in front of him", Friedrich declared, "but what he sees inside himself … The artist’s emotion is his law."
This intuitive grasp of the world around - and within - him was not an exclusive hallmark of Friedrich's art. Other artists in his era, the age of revolutions, French and Industrial, were also aiming to create spiritual and emotional foundations for their work.
The greatest cultural figure of Friedrich's age was certainly interested in addressing the ways that Stimmung or mood affects human creativity. Johan Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the Sage of Weimar, made much of human emotions in his renowned literary works, the Sorrows of Young Werther and Faust.
Goethe was also a man dedicated to rigorous scientific study. He had earlier addressed Friedrich's "the artist’s emotion is his law" by formulating the concept of Manner. In Goethe's view, "manner" in art was the creation of a visual language based on a connection between the human soul and the painted or printed image.
Friedrich was certainly capable of painting works which exemplified the connection of soul and image. His Cross in the Forest (1812) is an appealing, beautifully composed painting which unites symbolism and naturalism. An icon of radiant spirituality invites and awaits our response, which, when given, will hopefully contribute to a shared purpose of life and faith.
A careful study of the respective pronouncements of Friedrich and Goethe is less reassuring. Instead of mutual convictions, a lurking chasm exists between the undiluted subjectivity of Friedrich and the more focused integration of spirit and form espoused by Goethe.
This difference in interpretation would eventually lead to misunderstanding and recrimination between Goethe and Friedrich - and tragic consequences for the latter.
Initially, Friedrich seemed destined to be a Goethe protege, on the fast track to success as one of the principal painters of Germany. Goethe, whom Thomas Carlyle would later call "the greatest genius that has lived for a century, and the greatest man that has lived for three", was a patron worth cultivating.
In 1805, Goethe sponsored an art festival at which Friedrich won a major award. Following this heady start to their relationship, Goethe began recommending Friedrich's paintings to the court of the Duchy of Weimar for inclusion in the ducal art collection. Friedrich regularly sent new works to Goethe for his comments and approval.
In 1810, Goethe visited Friedrich's studio in Dresden, a magnificent tribute to a rising artist. Goethe praised the works in progress in his diary. "Wondrous landscapes," he wrote.
A few years later, Goethe's regard for Friedrich had
radically changed. He could barely look at a Friedrich landscape. In a fit of rage, Goethe declared “one ought to break
Friedrich’s pictures over the edge of a table. Such things must be prevented.”
What had occurred to trigger this outburst?
An incident in 1816 illustrates the growing rancor between Goethe and Friedrich. It is unlikely that this dispute was the sole or primary cause of estrangement between the two men. But it certainly points to fundamental differences in the world views of the Sage of Weimar and the "mystic with a paintbrush."
To complement his research in meteorology, Goethe asked Friedrich to create several cloud studies. This was a subject of much importance to scholars and artists of the day, including John Constable in England.
Incredibly, Friedrich refused Goethe's request. To him the heavens were a celestial realm where one should seek manifestations of divine purpose rather than scientific data.
Friedrich certainly could have accurately depicted the various types of clouds. He proved that, later, in a stunning 1824 oil sketch. Entitled Evening, this oil study is, in the words of the German art scholar, Markus Bertsch, "full of characteristic cloud formations that seem pink due to the blaze of the red sunset. These are cirrus clouds, which consist of fine ice crystals and are only found at great heights."
Friedrich may have decided to reject Goethe's commission to do cloud studies because he had been criticized early in his career for using a secular medium, landscape painting, to express religious convictions. In fact, he had been condemned for sacrilege! Yet, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Friedrich made a huge error in not honoring Goethe's request.
This mistake was much more serious than failing to keep his patron happy. In asking Friedrich to make cloud studies, Goethe was paying him an exceptional compliment for his skill in drawing. This is one of the revelations of The Met's exhibition, which presents an impressive array of Friedrich's drawings and prints.
Many of Friedrich's sketches in The Met exhibit do not reproduce well in a blog like Art Eyewitness. But I found one, dating to 1806, on the website of the Dresden art musuem which proves that a comparison with Dürer is not exaggerated praise.
Nature studies like Pflanzenstudie showed that Friedrich could paint what was in front of him. To Goethe this was an important ability for which there was pressing need. Goethe sought to revive European civilization after the horror of the Napoleonic wars. He aimed to encourage both the arts and scientific inquiry, thereby promoting a consensus to bridge the growing split between what we now call the "two cultures" from the title of C.P. Snow's celebrated 1959 essay.
Friedrich's skill set marked him as the perfect comrade for Goethe in nurturing a new Renaissance. Instead, he withdrew into an interior world of his own until he was dubbed "the most solitary of the solitary."
Friedrich's "wanderer above a sea of fog" is an exalted figure. This most famous of Friedrich's images is also among his most unusual. Rather than standing transcendent on a mountain peak, the characteristic Friedrich protagonist is a lonely, searching figure, staggering under burdens of doubt, fear and loneliness.
The Monk Beside the Sea (1808-10), The Chasseur in the Forest (1813-14) and A Walk at Dusk (1830-35): these are signature Friedrich figures.
Caspar David Friedrich, The Chasseur in the Forest (detail),
1813-14
These images of solitary searchers are each, in their way, alter egos for Friedrich. What motivated Friedrich the "soul searcher" to paint the haunted, mystical masterpieces which we are finally - hopefully - appreciating as such?
To be brief, Friedrich's life was shadowed by the death of his mother while he was a very young child and the especially traumatic death of one of his brothers. These early confrontations with death were later replicated in the experience of Edvard Munch, whose life and art closely resembled that of Friedrich.
Additionally, Friedrich lived throughout the long, bloody ordeal of the Napoleonic Wars and the political repression which followed. The same was true of Francisco Goya in Spain.
Friedrich, Munch and Goya all painted disturbing, symbolical works of art which reflected the turmoil of their lives and times. But of the three, only Friedrich can be said to have been a religious painter.
Spirituality, mysticism, the divine presence in nature, these were Friedrich's prevailing themes. And it is upon his handling of them that he needs to be judged.
Following his break with Goethe, Friedrich continued to paint masterful landscapes with religious overtones. These paintings, survivors of the 1931 fire and Allied bombing raids during World War II, are now treasures of Germany's art museums. During the 1820's and early 1830's, however, public taste in art experienced a major shift in Germany. Potential buyers became increasingly unresponsive to Friedrich's works. His sales plummeted and he and his family experienced dire hardship.
In 1835, Friedrich suffered a stroke which left him partially debilitated, unable to paint except with water color and sepia. Fortunately, the year before he had painted what amounts to a valedictory work. Though it reprises elements from earlier works, The Stages of Life is, by my reckoning, Friedrich's supreme masterpiece and one of the great, life-affirming works of art of all time.
There is more reason to see a universal meaning to this wondrous dreamscape.
But to which deep, abiding aspect of human life and destiny does Friedrich allude? Is this a painting about the transcience of life and the passing of control from one generation to the next? Or is it a deliberately unfathomable work of art, challenging us to consider the mystery of existence from what we see inside ourselves?
The correct explanation to these questions can best be found in Friedrich's "manifesto", quoted several times already. If the answer for the artist is what he or she sees "inside" themselves, so too for the art lover.
To search within is not a case of moral relevance where everything we decide is always and effortlessly correct. Reflection, soul-searching, listening for the voice of divinity in nature is a hard road, not an easy one.
This is the road which Caspar David Friedrich took in his art and in his life. And that is why we celebrate and honor his life and his art two and a half centuries after he was born.
***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved
Introductory Image: Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Gallery view of the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, showing Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog (1818)
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, 1818. Oil on canvas: 37 5/16 × 29 7/16 in. (94.8 × 74.8 cm). Hamburger Kunsthalle; Permanent loan from the Stiftung Hamburger Kunstsammlungen, acquired 1970. © SHK/ Hamburger Kunsthalle / bpk. Photo Elke Walford
Elina Brotherus, Der Wanderer 2, from the series “The New Painting”, 2004. Pigment ink from a digitized color negative: 105 x 128 cm (Artists Proof) Miettinen Collection, Berlin-Helsinki © Elina Brotherus / VG Bild Kunst, Bonn 2023
Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon, 1824-30.
Oil on canvas: 13 ¾ x 17 ¼ in. ( 34.0 x 43.8 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers-Seidenstein, Curators of the Caspar David Friedrich: the Soul of Nature exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Gallery view of the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Caspar David Friedrich’s Ruins of Oybin, 1812. Oil on canvas: 25 9/16 × 18 1/2 in. (65 × 47 cm) Hamburger Kunsthalle; permanent loan from Manfred Brockhaus
Georg Friedrich Kersting, Caspar David Friedrich in His Studio, 1811. Oil on canvas: 21 ¼ × 16 9/16 in. (54 × 42 cm) Hamburger Kunsthalle
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Caspar David Friedrich’s Cross in the Forest, 1812. Oil on canvas: 16 5/8 × 12 13/16 in. (42.2 × 32.6 cm) Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, portrait by Joseph Karl Steiler (1828) Neue Pinkothek collection; Caspar David Friedrich, portrait by Gerhard von Kugelgen (1808) Hamburger Kunsthalle collection. Photo files from Internet Creative Commons.
Caspar David Friedrich, Evening, 1824. Oil sketch on cardboard: 20 x 27.5 cm. Kunsthalle Mannheim. © Foto / Kunsthalle Mannheim / Cem Yucetas
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Caspar David Friedrich’s Rock Archway in the Utterwalder Grund, 1803. Brown ink and wash over pencil on wove paper: 27 13/16 × 19 11/16 in. (70.6 × 50 cm) Museum Folkwang, Essen
Caspar David Friedrich, Pflanzenstudie, 1806. Lead pencil drawing: 158 x 135 mm. Kupferstich-Kabinett. Staatliche Kuntsammlungen Dresden
Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1808-10. Oil on canvas: 43 5/16 × 67 1/2 in. (110 × 171.5 cm) Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Caspar David Friedrich’s The Chasseur in the Forest (detail), 1813-14.Oil on canvas: 25 13/16 × 18 3/16 in. (65.5 × 46.2 cm) Private collection
Caspar David Friedrich, A Walk at Dusk, ca. 1830-35. Oil on canvas: 13 1/4 × 17 in. (33.7 × 43.2 cm) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Caspar David Friedrich's The Stages of Life, ca. 1834. Oil on canvas: 28 3/4 × 37 in. (73 × 94 cm) Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig
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