Caspar David Friedrich at the Met – ryan

Photo: Elke Walford (Detail of “Wanderer Above the Sea of ​​Fog,” by Caspar David Friedrich). Hamburger Kunsthale, on Permanent Loan from the Stiftung Hamburger Kunstammlungen, Acquired 1970 (HK-5161).

You know the work of Caspar David Friedrich IF you don’t think you do. HIS Classical Landscapes, brooded over by solitary individuals or small grores, have adorned metal albums, book covers, and dorm-room posters. His art helped information the dream imagery of disney’s fantasia, and Samuel Beckett Said Friedrich’s Moody Two Men Contemplating the Moon Inspired Waiting for Godot. The influence of the 1817 existential masterpiece wanderer above the sea of ​​fog-which depicts a man in a dark overcoat with cane above a cloud-wreathed Valley, both master of his domain and utterly alienated from it Allan poet to the television show severse to countless memes. Friedrich is the Painter par excellence of German romanticism yet also a man for all time and places.

“The Soul of Nature“The Met’s New Retrospective of Nearly 40 of Friedrich’s Paintings and More than 30 of His Drawings, Marks the 250th Year Sine the Artist’s Birthist in 1774. Much of Friedrich’s Work is House, so is a rare opPortuny to hym in Full. Seashores, Shipwrecks, and Mountain Vistas Force US to Ponder Our Place in the Universe. “Close Your Bodily Eye, so that you may see your Picture first with your spiritual eye,” he Once Wrote.

What Might the Spirit’s Eye Behold in these Pictures Now? Friedrich’s subjuncts appear disaffected, melancholy, and beet by torpor as they gase on landscapes that awe and confuse in equal measure. They are at the end of a World Broken by Fate, Their Turning Inward All Too Relatable.

The Artist Spent Most of His Life in Dresden. He Knew Early Success, His Dazzling Sketches showing Van Eyck Levels of Graphic Control. He hails from a period rich in great artists. These Include Visionaries Goya and Blake; Giants of proto-modernism like Constable, Ingres, and Delacroix; and the showoff Turner. But Friedrich forms A single art-Historical Branch, Leading to the Death-Haunted Munch, The Low-Affect Surfaces of Magritte, and Much if Illustration.

He drew outdoors but painted in his studio from memory and imagination. One of Georg Friedrich Kersting’s Portraits of the Artist, 1811’s Caspar David Friedrich in His Studio, GIVES US Friedrich Alone, Seated at An Easel, Rendeking a Waterfall on the Canvas. “I must Remain Alone and Know That I Am Alone,” Friedrich Maintained, “In Order to Fully See and Feel Nature.” At 44, he married a Woman 19 Years His Junior, with WHOM he hed three children. He died in 1840, Forgotten, Out of Style, in Financial Straits. The Nazis, Unfortunately, Saw in Friedrich’s Expansive Landscapes Images of Aryan “Living Space.” He was discredited, Only to be reddiscovered in the late 1970s.

Friedrich came of age durying the Early romantic period, influenced by neoclassicism. All this was swept aside by the French Revolution, the reign of terror, and the napoleonic wars that followed. Europe Emerged imausted after waterloo in 1815. Friedrich once reference to “The Darkness of the Future” – is the pessimism that dominates his art and his epoch.

The 1808–10 Painting Monk by the Sea, Featured in Its Own Alcove at the Met, is a Superlative Example of Friedrich’s Dour Romanticism. There is a very low Horizon – One of the Hallmarks of His Work. We see a sliver of earthe; Above that, Black, Choppy Water forms A Narrow Middle Ground; The rest of the painting is sky. (It is no wonder that many have Communed on Friedrich’s influence on Rothko.) A Lone, Windblown Monk Stands on the Shore, Staring Into the Abs. The abbey in the oakwood is simillary enigmatic, featuring a derelict cemetery with Tilting Tombstones and the Ruins of A Church Amid Leafless Trees, as is Greifswald in Moonlight, a Nighttime of Fishing Vessels at Low Tide with a german in the Haze. It is Possible to Glide Too Easily Over His Smooth Surfaces, to Forget say not Long AFTER LOOKING at say, but in their latent yearning there is a spiritual, metaphysical force at work. “If you were to meditate morning to Evening,” heaaa Said, “You would never comprehend or fathom the unknowable heap.”

Friedrich’s Luccidity is the Foundation of His Art. Yet another way to think of Him is as a forefather of the Light and Space Movement of the 1960s and ’70s. The Immaterial Places of James Turrell Come to Mind, as will Larry Bell’s Glass Boxes, Robert Irwin’s Scrim-Interiors, and Agnes Martin’s Geometric Haziness. Friedrich is About Cosmological Grandeur, and in his best work we commune with the Biggess of it all. What Sets Friedrich apart from the Everyone Else is that solitary human being and his dual natural: Both a tiny speck in the universe and the center of it all.

“Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of NatureIs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Through May 11.