His landscapes are serene, impregnated with melancholy, always meticulous in the detail of the trees, branches, clouds, sea, rivers or rocks. On the rare occasions when people appear, they have their backs to the viewer, contemplating what is most important, the views, which thus acquire connotations of philosophical depth. Caspar David Friedrich, the emblematic painter of German romanticism, left an artistic legacy that seduces with its dreamy beauty, and that was incredibly forgotten for a long time.
Berlin is now celebrating the 250th anniversary of his birth with an exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie that, titled Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes, traces his career, which marked the landscaping of northern Europe in the first half of the 19th century. There are 60 paintings and more than 50 drawings. The Alte Nationalgalerie – one of the institutions on the famous Museum Island in Berlin – has one of the largest collections of Friedrich's paintings in the world, although for the occasion it also exhibits loans from other museums.
“Although the paintings are based on detailed drawings, like the ones we can also see here, they are not a reflection of nature; They are actually Friedrich's visions on the great philosophical questions of human existence,” explained the museum's director, Ralph Gleis, during a tour of the exhibition with foreign correspondents.
On the walls hang some of the masterpieces that Friedrich created with exquisite brush, such as the famous White Cliffs on Rügen, dedicated to the chalk rocks of this Baltic Sea island. Friedrich painted this painting around 1818, the year of his wedding to Caroline Bommer. There is also the dramatic The Sea of Ice, which portrays a harrowing, icy shipwreck in the Arctic; and The Watzmann, which shows the majesty of this mountain massif in the Bavarian Alps.
Among the works on display are the two paintings that brought Friedrich to fame in 1810: Monk by the Sea, which represents a solitary figure before the immensity of a dark sea and a threatening sky, and Abbey in the Oak Forest, where The ruins of the building merge with the bare trees. Both were purchased by King Frederick William III of Prussia.
The Alte Nationalgalerie, heir to the collections of the Prussian royal house, boasts of having rescued Friedrich from oblivion more than a century ago. Because the work of the artist – born in 1774 in Greifswald, on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and died in 1840 in Dresden – was relegated during the second half of the 19th century. It was rediscovered and revalued thanks to an exhibition in Berlin in 1906 on German art that included 93 paintings by the romantic landscape painter. The current retrospective draws in part from that exhibition.
Expert Ralph Gleis described Friedrich as the best-known German painter after Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). “Friedrich was a master of air and light; He knew how to capture an atmospheric subtlety like no other, so this splendor and this vision of nature that he offers us is inimitable,” stated Gleis, enthusiastically. “And there is a lot of philosophy in it; about the existence of the human being, his position in the world and death,” he insisted.
More paintings parade before our eyes: Woman at the Window (1822), one of Friedrich's few interior paintings, which shows his wife Caroline, with her back turned in the artist's studio in Dresden, looking out the window. Outside you can see the Elbe River and the mast of a ship.
Or Willows before the low sun, an oil painting painted between 1830 and 1835 in which the landscape painter Friedrich captured the symmetrical solitude of two willow trees with broken trunks, among undergrowth, in front of a straw-colored sun. The dim light and the color of the few leaves suggest that it is late autumn or early winter. Or The Solitary Tree, painted in 1822 on behalf of a Berlin banker, who asked him for a morning landscape and an evening landscape. Friedrich chose an oak tree to center the painting of the morning view: a wide plain with meadows, ponds, a herd and, in the background, the Jeschken Mountains of northern Bohemia.
The one in Berlin is one of the three major exhibitions that Germany dedicates to the artist for the 250th anniversary of his birth. One was held in Hamburg, at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and attracted 335,000 visitors. Titled Caspar David Friedrich. Art for a new time, between December and April, it addressed the new relationship between human beings and nature through 60 works by Friedrich, including the famous The Walker on the Sea of Clouds.
In August he will open another exhibition at the Albertinum in Dresden, significantly titled Caspar David Friedrich. Where it all began, because in the Saxon capital he lived and worked for almost his entire existence. A good part of the landscapes that he immortalized are in the surroundings of the city, a sign of his love for observing what is nearby to elevate it to art.
Caspar David Friedrich. Paisajes infinitos. Comisaria: Birgit Verwiebe. State Museums in Berlin (SMB). It's the 4th day
