"In his Moonrise over the Sea (1822, Staatliche Museen, Berlin), a man and two women stand on a rock and watch as the moon, symbol of divinity, dispels the gloom of a leaden purple sky with its orange glow, while two boats, symbol of life coming to an end, head for a dense, deep sea. The son of a sailor and born on the Baltic, Caspar David Friedrich painted the sea, snow-capped mountains, trees, sun and moon, subjects transfigured by the illumination of the artist's inner feeling when confronted with the enveloping grandeur of nature. The context in which the painting was written had a significant impact on how it turned out to look. He was influenced in his formative years by the severe and oppressive religious experience of his family, which he overcame through the philosophy and poetry of the Jena School, which he discovered under the guidance of G. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog in its iconic symbolism of self-reflection on an uncertain future is a fitting visual metaphor that was popular among artists and philosophers of that time (Robinson, 2020, p. The work of the artists who worked around Friedrich (Georg Friedrich Kersting, Johan Christian Dahl) is interesting, although it never gave rise to a real school.įor his intense expression of the incommensurability of the universe in the face of human experience, Caspar David Friedrich is considered the leading figure in German landscape painting. The artist prefers the landscape at certain times of the day, when it lends itself to more direct psychological correlations, as in works where small human figures appear isolated and almost lost (Two Men Contemplating the Moon, 1819). The complexity of his vision is especially evident in contrast to the archaic tendencies of the Nazarenes, who experienced the incompleteness of the subject entirely as a loss, which they attempted in vain to overcome with anachronistic techniques and subject matter.The meaning of his works is enriched by frequent references to German mythology in the later paintings, the symbolic value becomes more evident in the choice of subjects and the simplification of forms. Friedrich’s remarkable understanding of incompleteness as a central generative force in Romantic art gives his work its aura of contemporary relevance even in the postmodern age. The wanderer, like many narrators in Romantic fiction, is at once a conduit through which the reader or viewer enters the representation and, as an inscrutable other, a gatekeeper of that subjective representation’s alterity, which can never be completely shared. The world can only be glimpsed, experienced, and reproduced from a single point of view, in fragments, never as complete and whole in and of itself. Friedrich’s frequent use of the so-called Rückenfigur – a prominently placed figure shown entirely from the back – is a powerful commentary on the Romantic experience of art and nature. But he is also like the traveler of English romantic poetry, alive to the sublime glories of nature that open up before him during his pensive walks. He is like Schubert’s wanderer, a stranger in the world, the very icon of modern alienation. His gaze gives meaning to the world, and yet this world remains an unknowable mystery to him, shrouded in fog. This wanderer is the very embodiment of the Kantian subject, in whose perception all aesthetic judgment is born. Like Eugène Delacroix’s painting July 28: Liberty Leading the People (1830), Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog has come to represent the feeling of an entire age. There is probably no other image in the history of art that has graced more dust jackets of books on the history, philosophy, and literature of modernity. From Vormärz to Prussian Dominance (1815-1866)Ĭaspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above a Sea of Fog (c.
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