Caspar David Friedrich^ the peculiar Romantic. The Landscape of Longing BY ANNE HOLLANDER nly nine oil paintings and exhibition de\oted t(.> Friedricb ever to ticeable thing abotit this mini-retro- eleven works on paper be moimted in tbis coiuitiy. It is possible spective is its consistency. Friedrich iiKikc lip the Metropolitan that many more Friedricbs still lurk in perfected his method by 1808 and O Mtiseiiin's current exhibi- the Soviet Union, unknown in tbe West, never changed it, even dining the peri- tion of Caspar David Fricdricli's works even in repiodnction; but for now we are od after his stroke in 1835, wben he from Russia; and thev are only mininiallv gi'eatly pleased to see these. worked very little. augmeiilfd by a lew engravings, owned They are few, and many are ver\' Friedricb never dated bis paintings, by ibe niiist'uin. wliicb were made by ibe small, aitbotigb two of tbem, meastir- and lie sbowed none of tbat obsession artist's brotber from some with development so com- of Friedricb's 180:i draw- mon to artists of his peri- ings. Housed far to the od and to others ever rear of tbe main floor in a since. Apparently lie bad small section ol tbe I.eb- no need to enact a \isible man wing, this sbow must figbt for artistic teriitorA, be sotiglit otit, but it is im- to be seen to be struggling portant despite its small steadily along insicle the si/e and ascetic Haxor. C.as- meditmi itself, to give per- par David Friedricb (I 774- pettial evidence of bis per- 1H40) is now generally ac- sonal battle witb tbe in- knowledged as a great tractable eye, tbe pesky Romantic painter, and materials, tbe superior predecessors, (he pre.sent space lias been made for ri\als, with aljiding artistic bim beside I inner, (ieri- problems and new selt- cault, Blake, and Goya on imposed technical tasks, tbe roster of Eaily Nine- vvitli dominant opinion, teenth Centnry Originals. witb the laziness that gives Friedricbs are now repro- in to facility, with the stti- duced on book jackets, re- poi" tbat blocks defmitive cord albums, and in otber vision and action. Unlike pnblic places, and tbe pic- t'vei-vbody's otlier favorite torially conscious bave Romantics, Friedricb re- added The Cross in the fused to demonstrate tbe Mountains, The Monk on the new drama of tbe paint- Seashore, and The Arctic er's work, tbe pbrasing of Sh'tpurreck to tbeir mental a personal career in paint. fiiriiitiire along witb The There are, instead, ter- Raft of (he Medusa and The tain tightly controlled ThinI (if May. shifts in a prevailiiig idea And yet virttially all that itself is not abotit of Friedrich's important piuiiting, aUhongb it bas works are in Germany, to do witb art. Friedricb witli some in Atistria and gives the strong impres- Russia, wbereas England, sion of being glad to be France, and the United alone witb bis preoccupa- States boast just one paint- tions, eager to satisfy only ing each, and no major bis inward eye. He is quite ones. Tbe ctirrent show free of tbe artistic self-importance tbat offers an tinparalleled \iew of the works ing about .'i^l incbes by ()7 incbes, are places itself inside a current idea of tbe the largest be e\'er did. It is also true state of |>aiiiting. Instead he seems burst- now held at the Hermilage and the Piisb- ing witb a particular spiritiial conscious- kin Mu.seimi, none of wbicb bus ever that none of bis most celebrated and ness that requires illustration; and tbat's been to America before, and many of pt)ptilar woiks is among these, wbicb what gives sticb peculiar intensity to all which are not even commonly repro- are less spectacular. Still, tbey span bis works. Packed into tbese .soberly duced. Tins is, in fact, tbe first Friedrich's whole career, and they give wrongbt views of variotis sober subjects is ample evidence of bis unique quality at a single concentration, a uniform fottis ANNE HoLL.\NiJt:R is ihe atitbor most re- every stage of his life, and in the differ- cently of Moving Pictures (Kno|)f). ent media that be used. Tbe first no- 30 THE NEW Rcpt Bur APRIL l, 1991 that has the same register whether the roque horror merchants such as Salva- their announced themes and known pa- arti.st is dealing witli gothic ruins in the tor Rosa. Friedrich stayed with the old trons, must appear to have fundamental- moonlight or with a local fence or a win- Nordic school that renders fearful ma- ly detached their artistic selves from the dow in the morning. terial with limpid modesty. requirements of the chtirch, tbe duke, or He was dubbed great in this country the academy, from eveiything but their t is the very difTerence among and acquired his popularity here, as in personal responses to the demands of these subjects that makes Frie- France and England, only during the last painting when they actually took up the drich's single-miiidediiess so twent) years, and in Germany only in this brush. One sign of this was that they I uncanny. He was devoted to century. Having been successful at the would appear especially detached from his native North German landscape beginning of his career, he had already too careful (usually called slavish) imita- around the Baltic port of Greifswald, and fallen into disfavor by the second half of tions of realistic appearance that might to the nearby places where he did his it. even at home, and was forgotten at the seem intended to make base appeals to only traveling, and he celebrated them time of his death. He was revived in Ger- sentiment or stupefaction. all again and again with his usual concen- many in the early 1900s and became cele- trated reticence, But he was also wonder- brated, but only there. Some art histori- ntil the 1960s Friedrich's fully unafraid of owls and moons, sun- ans and art lovers outside Germany fate as an obscure cult fig- beams and crosses, swans and ships, encountered his works on their travels or ure was sealed by his utter anchors and towers: the whole ware- in books and fell in love with him; but unwillingness to expound any painterlUy turbulence or spontaneity hotise of old spiritual emblems. He theirs was a subterranean passion at odds found that they would do veiy well, just with a hundred years of prevailing taste. in a set of energetic new graphic terms as they always had. And he wasn't afraid Reasons have been addticed for Frie- (the quality that made Delacroix and of absolute symmetry either, which also drich's lack ot modern fame outside Ger- Turner so appealing to the modern .served splendidly, just as in the Middle many, beginning with the proposition world); by his obvious comfort with the Ages, to impose its ancient authority on a that the Nazis took him up and so no one rigors of his technical training and his seeker's needy eye. In Friedrlch's works, else could. But I don't believe that. It belief in sober speech devoid of elliptical a taut new atmosphere is held in place by might have been true of Bocklin. for ex- or fragmented rhetoric; and especially by veiy old devices. his unashamed expression of a profound religiotis desire, unmcdiated by literary For Friedrich. the new meaning being mythologies in the style of Blake or by discovered in land and light and water, The Romantic Vision Of Caspar David Friedrich: political passion and social satire in the the things Turner was working with so mode of Goya, and tuiashamedly ren- Paintings and Drawings from explosively, had to be fused and integrat- dered in the tight simplicities of an out- ed with potent old emblematic machin- the U.S.S.R. moded painterly system. ery, and so did the casual beauty of (The Meuopolitan Musetmi of Art, New York, homely details. He did not try to look Januaiy 23 to March 31, 1991; In 197.^. in Modem Painting and the revolutionary by scrapping those old vo catalog edited by Sahiiie Rewald, Northern Romantic Tradition, his book cabularies, but he clearly did not rely on 110 pp., S'24.5d, $18.75 paper) about the kind of modern painting that them either. He made plenty of pictures expresses spiritual longing, Robert Ro- without any crosses, coffins, or ruins at Caspar David friedrich senblum offered Friedrich as a source all, indeed often with nothing but trees, and the Subject of Landscape for painters such as Gottlieb and Rothko, images that are nevertheless tense with by Joseph Leo Koerner whose versions of intense nothingness he (Yale University Press, 256 pp., $50) the same fateful longing that informs the demonstrated to be similar illustrations moonlit graveyards. of "the search for the sacred in the secu- With all his unprecedented advances ample, except that people hated Bocklin lar modern world." But it is important to in the spiritual use of pure landscape, not because Goring liked him, but be- remember that Friedrich's own search insisted on precisely the verity that was Friedrich discarded nothing he inherit- cause most of Bocklin is truly dreadful. abandoned by modern seekers. A deli- ed from the atistere Northern tradition Friedrich had other qualities that ren- cate respect for each twig continued to that began in the fifteenth century. This dered him tmacceptable in an aesthetic climate dominated by French ideals of be essential to his quest, as it was not to meant that he could help himself to Turner's at the time, nor certainly later landscape motifs used by Northern Re- perpetual artistic revolution, of the abid- ing valtie of an avant-garde.