Page 23 - Studio International - September 1972
P. 23
Caspar David Friedrich: a reappraisal
Robert Rosenblum
If the National Gallery or the Louvre owned bad, high and low, is being recharted and The standards set by French art have
even only one major painting by the German reassessed, the question seems timely; and dominated our experience of modern painting
Romantic master Caspar David Friedrich especially now in London, when the Tate for so long that even such very un-French
(1774—1840), would our ideas about that Gallery is displaying over one hundred masters as Friedrich's contemporaries,
often recited, Paris-based history of modern paintings and drawings by Friedrich, borrowed Constable and Turner, have gained
art, from David to Manet to Picasso, be primarily from those Western and Eastern respectability as internationally significant
different ? Especially in the 1970s, when the German collections in which he looms large as artists only by being grafted on to an
bewilderingly vast international territory of a national hero, the question becomes art-historical Darwinian tree that finally
nineteenth-century painting, both good and imperative. burgeons into French Impressionism. But if
these English painters could be distorted into
prophets of Monet by isolating the shimmer
and fluidity of their brushwork or their
sensibilities to the ephemera of light and
weather, what, if anything, can be done with
Friedrich ? For characteristically, his handling
of paint and his ordering of landscape and
figures are so taut and ascetic that, at their most
persuasive, they can immobilize the spectator
in a posture and in an emotion as solemnly
sustained as an act of religious contemplation.
Indeed, if we are to see Friedrich with sympathy,
we must understand that the pleasures of his
painting are not pleasures at all, at least in the
French sense of la belle peinture or l'art pour
l'art. Rather, his work provides unforgettably
potent images of those agonizing questions
posed by the Northern Romantics : what is the
relation of the individual to the universe ? how
can God be resurrected after being defiled and
buried by eighteenth-century atheism ? how
can nature, rather than orthodox Christianity,
create a new way of contacting the world of the
spirit ?
So passionate was Friedrich's quest for the
answer to these questions that he managed,
virtually single-handed, to transform the most
prosaic, secular traditions of Dutch
seventeenth-century art—genre, landscape, and
marine painting—into images of unprecedented
mystery and longing. Consider only such a
modest painting as the Woman at the Window
(I822), in which a figure, probably to be
identified as the artist's wife Caroline Bommer,
stands, her back to us, before a window view of
only the haziest suggestion of maritime
activity. An objective catalogue description
would not be able to distinguish this work
from, say, a seventeenth-century Dutch genre
painting of an anonymous woman in a tidy
domestic interior with a window view of a boat
and a river. Our subjective response, however,
immediately recognizes the emotional
modernity of Friedrich's painting, a mood of
privacy and longing that extends both
psychologically and spatially beyond the
confines of the commonplace.
How is this change wrought ? For one,
Friedrich establishes here a characteristic
polarity between an isolated figure and some
undefined world beyond, so that the immaculate
Woman at the Window 1822. Oil on canvas, 44 x 47 cm. Nationalgalerie, Berlin German interior, with its lean rectilinear
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