Page 25 - Studio International - September 1972

Monk by the Sea 1809. Oil on canvas. Schloss Charlottenburg

to record the artifacts and rituals of Christianity set apart from us by Friedrich's recurrent consequences in the modern tradition: a picture,
as preserved in the modern world by the spatial order: a sudden contrast between a as was said about Turner's late works, of nothing
material relics of religious art and by the faith of darkened, terrestrial foreground and a at all. Before Friedrich's innovation, we stand,
simple people. (Millet's Angelus and Gaugin's luminous, incorporeal beyond. But still more too, with the monk on the shore, on the brink of
Yellow Christ are among the most famous convincing to us, thanks probably to its nearly a natural abyss that, in our secular world, has
progeny of this new attitude.) For another, he total absence of conventional Christian replaced for most of us the orthodox religious
interprets the martyrdom of Christ not only symbolism, is the great painting that Friedrich symbolism of the afterlife.
through new configurations of traditional executed shortly after the Tetschen Altar, the In painting such pictures, Friedrich found
Christian symbols in the gilded frame he designed Monk by the Sea, a work exhibited in 1810 at the the visual means of expressing for the first time
for the picture (the all-seeing eye of God, the Berlin Academy where it startled spectators, as an enigma and an anxiety that would continue
Eucharistic wheat and grapes, the adoring it still does in Berlin today, by its trancelike to haunt the history of modern art, especially
angels), but more originally, through freshly emptiness. It is not only the archetypal outside Paris. That pursuit of the void, that
invented landscape symbols that he himself Friedrich image, but one of the seminal pictorial sense of standing on the fringe of a mysterious,
elucidated in a letter of 1809. Thus the Nordic statements of a Romantic dilemma that is as incorporeal unknown were goals which not only
evergreens, whose ivy tenaciously twists about nagging today as it was at the dawn of the inspired masters of Friedrich's own generation,
the base of the cross, become, like the rock on nineteenth century. A lone Capuchin monk—the like the elder Turner, but continued to obsess
which the crucifix is erected, a symbol of man's only motif in the painting that could in any way such Northern landscape masters as Munch
steadfast faith and hope; and the radiance of allude to traditional religious experience— and Hodler and the younger Mondrian.
the setting sun evokes the passing of the old silently contemplates a new holy trinity of dune, And more recently, too, the art of Rothko
pre-Christian order, whose dying rays are water, and sky. Dwarfed by the immensity of the and Newman can attest to the persistent
transferred to the new reflections from the universe, he stands below the utterly unbroken, vitality of the mystical traditions inaugurated
golden body of the crucified Christ. absolute line of the horizon. Recent research has by Friedrich. Confronted with the fearful
If some of Friedrich's contemporaries felt disclosed that, in what must have been a silence and symmetry of Rothko's ominous
that the so-called Tetschen Altar wrongly moment of courageous insight, Friedrich clouds of atmospheric colour or the heroic
usurped the traditional anthropomorphism of painted out the boats that originally gave some infinities of Newman's giant expanses of
religious painting by means of landscape, we narrative straw, however slight, to cling to, impalpable paint, we can still feel the spectre of
today probably feel, on the contrary, that the thereby producing bewilderment in those of his Friedrich's quest for new icons that,
most compelling aspect of the altarpiece is contemporaries who expected to see a appropriate to our secularized world, translate
precisely its translation of transcendental conventional marine painting and thereby the pre-Romantic mysteries of religion into
experience into the natural phenomenon of a risking an astonishing compositional and the post-Romantic mysteries of art. q
partly concealed sunset, whose infinite glow is iconographic heresy of immeasurable

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