Page 20 - Studio International - September 1972

Salvator Rosa and Swaneveldt on the other side call a landscape at that time ....' concentration demanded. It is comparable to
had become more and more weakly drawn out, a `It cannot be the task here to want to explain the sensation one may sometimes have in the
kind of landscape had gained place, alongside an how a fresh morning gradually broke midst of a real landscape in which all elements
occasionally still skilfully performed scenery everywhere in this art, how the volcanic of the situation—the geography, the lighting, the
painting coming out of the practice of the two convulsion, which from 1789 on transformed weather, the objects to be seen, the sounds and
Canaletti, which we can today only really Europe, in a strange way repeated itself in art as one's own mood combine together to form a
approve of as a finer kind of wallpaper painting. in science. Here this introduction should only harmonious whole. This integrated, if complex
A few dark, mannered trees at each side of the draw our attention to one initial fact, namely sensation imprints itself on the memory, and
foreground, some ruins of an old temple or a bit that in landscape painting it was especially may be recognized again, under quite different
of rock beside it, then in the middle ground a Friedrich, who, with a profoundly thoughtful particular conditions, if the same sort of
few accessory figures on foot or on horseback, and vigorous spirit, and with an absolutely situation recurs. Not that Friedrich's paintings
where possible with a river and a bridge and original method, grasped the confused mass of are like real landscapes. His philosophy of
some cattle, a passage of blue mountains behind the commonplace, the prosaic and the stale and, painting had as little to do with naturalism as
all this and some deftly executed clouds above, beating it down with a dry melancholy, with the capturing of chance dramas created by
that was more or less what one was allowed to produced out of the middle an individual, new, the vagaries of geology or meteorology. The
luminous and poetic direction. representation of natural oddities was sometimes
`We do not in any way wish to present his a part of his means, but never his aim. Friedrich
kind of conception of landscape art as the only was concerned to paint the almost unattainable,
true one, and still less as the only one to follow; not the impossible, the fantastic, or the merely
but whoever wants to realize something out of picturesque.
that formerly mechanical, trivial condition of This concentration which the paintings of
this art, and is still able to realize something, Friedrich demand, the almost spell-like
will feel that the emergence of such a new influence they exert over the spectator, is
direction of the original spirit, as it appears in certainly the intentional result of his whole
Friedrich, must have a stimulating, even conception of painting, of his view of the
convulsive effect on every sensitive mind. relation between Art and Nature, and is achieved
"There is a man who has discovered the tragedy by his manipulations of the two elements of
of landscape." This phrase of the sculptor the language he was using—the pictorial or
David d'Angers brought him into a closer subject matter element, and the descriptive or
contact with Friedrich and his work, and can be notational element.
seen as a characteristic effect on a man who had The surface of a Friedrich painting has a
himself a poetic individuality.' uniform tactile 'density', rather like a
transparent skin stretched over the picture
Reflections in front of the paintings plane, which gives the feeling that light,
I. General: Perhaps the most striking aspect of independently of thick or thin paint, or of the
the experience of looking at a painting by lights and shadows represented, exists
Friedrich is the intense and undivided distributed throughout the painting.
Any attempt on the part of the spectator to
penetrate this dense surface, to come to grips
with the spaces and objects depicted, is repulsed
by the play between the linear and tonal
notations used to represent those objects, and
the surface structure of the material paint marks
and areas used to execute those notations.
The result is that the corporeal, sensual
qualities of the objects represented (figures,
church spires, trees, landscape configurations,
ships) elude one, and one is left with the almost
diagrammatic indication of an object's presence,
the tangible painted surface, and the sensation
of all-pervading light. For light is the ultimate
subject of all Friedrich paintings, and just as its
symbolic use plays so large a part in the meaning
structure, so does its sensational use largely
determine the compositional structure.
This elusive, impenetrable quality in
Friedrich's paintings, together with the
concentration required to view them, presents
an approach to art which was something new in
European painting, and not without its dangers.
It explains the antagonism of Goethe to his