Caspar David Friedrich
The Soul of Nature
The Met Fifth Avenue
Through May 11
It is often thought that 19th-century landscape painting represented a secularization of subject matter, long after the pinnacle of religious art had been reached during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. But early in that century, German Romantics transformed and elevated landscape painting from the minor genre it had been up to that point, to be the bearer of serious and sublime content that had formerly been reserved for biblical or mythological subjects alone. This intimate and subjective approach to depicting landscape is abundantly clear in the retrospective exhibition of Caspar David Friedrich’s highly romantic work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Far from abandoning the sacred, Friedrich radically redefined it and expressed spiritual aspirations and moral lessons as an implied but often ambiguous narrative found within the work, a narrative frequently characterized by the theme of going on a journey, an excursion laden with mystical allusions and haunted by death.
In the extraordinarily subjective world of Friedrich, we are almost always positioned before a landscape that strongly suggests our presence, such as in the small painting Early Snow, which places us unmistakably on a path in the forest. The painting seems to invite us to enter and inhabit and move through that fictive space. The scene is an entire world unto itself, designed to be visually and imaginatively entered and “colonized” by the viewer. The viewer thereby becomes in some senses the “subject” of the painting, rather than the landscape, the elements of the terrain being a representation of the viewer’s subjective journey through life, an imaginative projection of the individual soul onto nature.
If this painting represents a snowfall early in the season, as indicated by the title, then it is a harbinger of colder, darker days to come. If we were to continue along this path, it seems to turn sharply to the right just beyond our view and leads us downhill into a dense, dark, and ancient evergreen forest. If taken as a metaphor for our life, this downward journey through the darkness may represent a season of introspection or even despair, yet the evergreen trees suggest life amid the winter. The blue sky and cumulus clouds glimpsed at the very top of the composition promise the bright sunlit meadows that lie beyond the forest, this segment of the journey being but one particularly dark chapter of a much longer novel.
The word romantic comes from the root word Roman, which in both French and German means “novel.” It is this novelistic quality, this sense of storytelling, that informs Friedrich’s painting, in which ultimately the protagonist represents the viewer, and her wanderings embody the traveler’s destiny as it unfolds over the course of a lifetime. It speaks to a spiritual journey, the individual’s Roman, the novel of a life, so to speak, thereby re-enchanting the mundane and making the very act of representation sacramental, while the experience of a sympathetic viewer of the picture then becomes almost mystical.
In Woman Before the Rising Sun, we see a common motif by Friedrich: a figure or figures with their back to us (called a Rückenfigur). We are not assisted in our interpretation of this picture’s meaning by the facial expression of the subject, so we are forced to imagine her feelings vicariously, as we stand before this small yet monumental painting.
The large rocks at her feet may represent the boulders or dolmen that mark prehistoric graves throughout German lands, and call to mind the primordial, archetypal experience of the sunrise as it has been observed since time immemorial. The viewer is thereby linked with an ancient tie to the land. Moreover, the Romantics considered women more primal, more connected to nature, than men and so the Rückenfigur is an evocation of a sort of natural awe that is universally aroused by the dawn.
The yellowish green of the meadow stretching out before her, as well as the tiny wildflowers at her feet, suggest that the season may be early spring, adding the newness of the year to the other indicators of awakenings and fresh beginnings. The woman seems to face the new day with optimism and gratitude, the result of God’s grace as revealed in a sacralized and romanticized natural landscape.
In Hut in the Snow, the hunter’s hut has long since been abandoned, the door hangs open and unhinged, with only blackness inside. Long unkempt grasses surrounding the hut bend beneath the weight of the heavy snow. Apparently, no one has walked here for years. As if to underscore the references to the absent hunter, a large branch of a dead tree has fallen to the ground, blocking our way to the empty hut. The hunter is either too old to enjoy the sport any longer or (perhaps more likely) he’s dead.
The strange trees behind the hut, which branch off so oddly from the lower, much thicker branches, are an indication that the tree had been cut back at a certain point and new branches have sprouted from where it had been truncated by the saw—it looks like quite a few years previously. And if these “re-sprouted” trees were not enough to make his point, a few pink blossoms have sprung up just to the left of the dark doorway—a detail almost too understated to notice.
The viewer’s presence in this scene is as a witness; the narrative is implied rather than stated directly by suggestive elements such as the fallen branch, the abandoned hut, the sprouting trees and the blossoms in the snow. The significance in Friedrich’s sublime painting of this humble and easily overlooked hunter’s hut, then, is the same as in the traditional iconography of the three astonished women at the empty tomb of the resurrected Christ early that first Easter morning.
Dr. Dennis Raverty is a retired associate professor of art history, specializing in art of the 19th and 20th centuries, and gives frequent presentations, both live and online.
