Dali House

“I lost a ship in the Baltic Sea,” the Bee Gees sang, “I’m on an iceberg running free.” Caspar Friedrich’s “The Stages of Life” – same sentiment, different century.
Click the detail to see whole painting.

The man in the top hat is perhaps being protective of his family, but then again maybe he’s not so altruistic. Maybe he knows that the old man appoaching him is his own death.

I’m not at all sure whether Caspar David Friedrich even intended the younger man’s raised arm to be a warning, a caution to his elder to keep his distance. It could be a man welcoming his father’s approach. But the evidence suggests otherwise.

This is the shore near the harbour of Greifswald, in Germany’s old Pomerania region on the Baltic Sea. Greifswald is where Friedrich was born on September 5, 1774, when it belonged to Sweden. That’s why the children in the painting are holding a Swedish flag.

The children are Friedrich’s own, Agnes and Gustav, as is the young woman, his elder daughter Emma. The man in the top hat is his nephew. The old man is Caspar Friedrich himself, with his back turned to us, like so many others in Friedrich’s art, a moody mannerism in painting that the symbolists called rueckenfigur. Five people, five ships.

He was 61 when he painted “The Stages of Life” in 1835, the same year he had a stroke that paralysed his right hand. Totting up his life’s cruel fortunes at a health resort at Teplitz, he must have seen the end coming. Death was approaching. His ship was sailing out to the far horizon.

Two years later he suffered a second stroke that seized almost all of his movement. Now he had only three years left. Another ship setting sail. Its mast looked like a crucifix.

What a life! His mother died when he was seven, and two sisters before he was 18. His father, a candlemaker, was brutally strict. One of his best friends was murdered. When Caspar was 13 he fell through some ice while skating and his older brother Johann drowned trying to save him. Stricken by guilt, scarred by sadness, he didn’t marry until he was 40, when he finally had enough money to do so.

“Sea of Ice” from 1824, also called “The Failed Hope”
Click the image to see it much larger.

His art is imbued with the warm reassurances of spiritualism, yet blackened by sordid politics. His fortunes waxed as German nationalism embraced the Romantics, then waned abruptly as the wealthy aristocracy returned and sided with the Realists. Friedrich and his kind, they said, were too emotional. Too French! A fine thing for an artist who had fashioned pictures of graveyards to decry France’s occupation of Dresden, where he had grown up and, for a while, thrived.

He painted an altarpiece that glorified the church and they called it sacrilege. Who else but pagans erect crosses in the wild mountains and fashion altars from boulders?

Precision’s ship was sailing in. The old man on shore could not be recognised.

One for every college dorm wall, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”, from 1817.

Wagnerian to his frozen skates, Caspar Friedrich filled canvases with scenes of poignant emptiness that nevertheless promised transfiguration. Rich symbolism leapt from the intensely spiritual atmosphere he gave each image.

He would go on walking tours of northern Bohemia, making detailed studies of nature, but he always transformed his sketches in the studio, using imagination and faith. He communed with nature, and then made it his own. In his morning mist the light shimmered with mysticism. “With nothing but a frame as foreground,” one observer felt as though his “eyelids had been cut away”.

“The pure, frank sentiments we hold in our hearts are the only truthful sources of art,” Friedrich said, his quotable quote. “A painting which does not take its inspiration from the heart is nothing more than futile juggling.”

He was reticent and unsociable, as one may well imagine given the tragedies that wounded him, but his talent was recognised early on, if not his genius. It was his “Tetschen Altar”, seen here, also called “Cross in the Mountains”, that grabbed the public’s attention first, in 1808, and then largely because it caused such a stir in the art community that the newspapers wrote about it. A high-ranking official named Ramdohr took umbrage at its Christian iconography in a woodland setting, and the ensuing “Ramdohr dispute” shook Romantic art to its gnarled roots.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe came to visit him in 1810. Perhaps the great scientist, politician and writer, himself a painter, wondered if Friendrich had made a Faustian pact with the demon on the mountain.

That was the year he painted “Monk at the Sea” and “Abbey in an Oak Forest”, both of which were purchased by Prussian Crown Prince Frederick William III, then all of 15 but keen in his adolescence. Friedrich was suddenly famous, and society must not have seemed so bad after all.

“Abbey with Oak Trees” some call it. One of many pictures he did of abbey ruins in the snow. Snow had often been painted before, but not like this. This wasn’t a Christmas frosting. In its muting, its fastening silence, it bore death and in the thaw miraculous rebirth.

And in the bleak winter is a church razed by the Reformation. Not even cathedrals can stand forever. No wonder Friedrich had his critics.

Then the French claimed Dresden and Caspar became a ghost in his high hills, the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, where he produced “Graves of Dead Freiheitskrieger” to express his disdain for the occupying army of Napoleon the Antichrist. Ironically. though, the French looting of Germany’s heritage made Germans think more highly of their own culture.

Friedrich waved the flag of the pan-Germanic movement, only to see it collapse when Napoleon met his Waterloo. The leading German liberals followed their art to France as Prussia’s princes reasserted control. This time Friedrich’s little royal patron wasn’t interested in his spiritual sagas. Romanticism was lost.

“Evening Landscape with Two Men”, 1830-35
Click the image to see it much larger.

In “Two Men Contemplating the Moon” (not this one), the stargazers are wearing traditional costumes that had been banned as being too sentimental. A mighty tree in silhouette years for heaven with them.

The conservatives frowned, but in 1816 Friedrich became a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in Dresden with a fixed salary and an offer of a trip to Rome to see the classical Italian art. He said no, worried his own might be tempted to transmute, but gladly accepted the money and with it arranged to marry Caroline Bonner, 22 years his junior.

Caroline appears in several of his paintings – her back turned to the viewer. In 1819, the year after they married, she gave him a daughter, Emma. Agnes Adelheid came along in 1823, and the next year Gustav Adolf, named after the Swedish king.

The Russians came calling, first Grand Duke Nikolay Pavlovich, the future Tsar Nicholas I, then the poet Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky, who bought paintings on the tsar’s behalf.

Friedrich depicted in his studio by Georg Friedrich Kersting in 1812, cornered by his own easel.

In 1825 the diplomat AI Turgenev wrote of visiting Friedrich’s studio. “Listening to him and seeing his paintings was wonderful … You may meditate over his paintings but not have a clear understanding of them, for they are vague even in his soul … “

But just the same, “all this captivates your soul, plunges you into dreams”.

Realism, however, changed the world. By 1833 Friedrich’s popularity was waning. Even Goethe found his allegories too ponderous. Better to destroy the canvases, he told a friend.

By the time of his first stroke in June 1835, he needed the sale of more works to the tsar to finance his recovery. Painting in oils was too strenuous, so he turned to watercolours. The second stroke, two years later, left him merely biding his time.

“Vulture on a Spade”

Friedrich died in obscurity on May 7, 1840, and was buried in Dresden’s Trinitatis Cemetery. It would be another half-century before his vision found someone to share it. In the second decade of the 20th century the symbolists, and then the surrealists, hailed him as a pathfinder.

Hitler had a go at upsetting the applecart, embracing Friedrich as an Aryan angel, which was sufficient to make art historians ignore him for another few decades. In World War II as well, some of his masterpieces were lost in the firebombing of Dresden. One, called “Abbey Graveyard under Snow”, was another crumbled monastery with what one observer called “a spectral procession of monks from a bygone age”. Only a reproduction survives, the same fan said, “a ghostly painting of ghosts”.

The celebrated French sculptor David d’Angers, who went out of his way to visit Friedrich in his prime, summed him up like this: “Here is a man who has discovered the tragedy of landscape.”

I think his work is sad for those who seek sadness, though. In his Turneresque landscapes, moors and mountains, there’s a tendency to the kitschy, but the composition is astounding, the detail demanding close scrutiny. You find yourself admiring Caspar’s planning and his technique, and then, almost without noticing the shift in thought, you discover you’re lost in his dream with him, and it’s a dream of hope. Every church falls, and then faith grows anew. Every ship sails, but there is always another shore.

There are some excellent hi-res reproductions of Friedrich’s works here.