Hamburg Art Gallery
Caspar David Friedrich as a pioneer of modernity
The Hamburger Kunsthalle is starting the anniversary year of the 250th birthday of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) with a major retrospective. photo
© Marcus Brandt/dpa
The anniversary show shows iconic Friedrich works such as “Chalk Cliffs on Rügen” and “Mönch am Meer”. But also current artistic receptions that open up new perspectives on the Romantic artist.
Nobody represents German romanticism like Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). A large exhibition marking his 250th birthday in the Hamburger Kunsthalle shows that the famous artist was also a pioneer of modernism. “The central theme is the novel relationship between people and nature in Friedrich’s landscape depictions.
In the first third of the 19th century, he provided significant impulses to make the landscape genre “art for a new time,” said director Alexander Klar in Hamburg. In the coming year, Berlin and Dresden will also dedicate their own thematic areas to the romantic artist Look.
Extremely rare Friedrich loans such as the paintings “Chalk Cliffs on Rügen” (around 1818–1822), “Monk by the Sea” (1808–1810) and “Two Men Contemplating the Moon” (1819/20) are available from December 15th to on April 1st, alongside the pictures “Wanderer over the Sea of Fog” (around 1817) and “The Sea of Ice” (1823/24) from the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s collection. A total of more than 60 paintings and around 100 drawings as well as works by artist friends can be seen. The enduring high level of fascination that Friedrich’s works trigger is demonstrated in a second, independent part of the exhibition, which is dedicated to Friedrich’s reception in contemporary art.
The cliché of the dark brooding person
The exhibition begins with various (self-)portraits of the artist, who was born in Greifswald in 1774. “Friedrich wasn’t just a dark brooding person. These clichés are problematic,” said curator Markus Bertsch. In Dresden, where he settled in 1798, the artist systematically acquired the tools he needed for his later works. “His drawings are very much about human feelings such as melancholy, loneliness and longing,” said Bertsch. He later rethought landscape painting by developing a form of painting that is extremely precise in the details, but invites thought through its composition and few meaningful pictorial objects.
In the painting “Ruine Oybin” (1812), the architecture is supplemented by a cross, an altar and a Madonna sculpture. The image invites you to think about questions of faith. In the later painting “Hutten’s Grave” (1823/24), however, there is more of a reference to political discussions. The ruins now become a place of commemoration of the humanist Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523) as well as protagonists of the wars of liberation who, although they overcame Napoleonic foreign rule, did not lead to the democratization that many had hoped for. In his most famous work, “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” (1817), Friedrich combines several aspects that are typical of Romantic art: the summit experience, loneliness, merging with nature and the motif of seeing.
Friedrich’s influence on modern art
The painting “Monk by the Sea” (1808-1810) confronts the viewer with a radical emptiness that has already surprised contemporary audiences. In a statement about the painting, Friedrich revealed a critical attitude towards the figure on the beach. He characterizes her as a person who presumes to want to understand, unravel and control everything. With his main work “The Sea of Ice” (1823/24), Friedrich also clearly rejected the human urge to explore and any feeling of superiority over a supposedly controllable nature.
The second part of the exhibition shows how his works have influenced contemporary artists. “The tension between environmental destruction and the longing for “untouched nature” forms a continuity from Romanticism to today,” said Bertsch. The Finnish artist Elina Brotherus stages herself in an interpretation of “Wanderer”. The photographer Andreas bother also re-stages Friedrich’s paintings and puts himself in the picture as a small, naked figure on the back, while the US artist Kehinde Wiley critically reflects on the Western white-dominated art canon. A color circle by the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson shows exactly the pigments of the painting “The Arctic Sea” – albeit in a highly abstracted composition.