Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature
Until you travel to Germany and see Germany’s most beloved landscape painter’s inspiration, the best thing is to see Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Widely regarded as the leading figure of the German Romantic movement, Caspar David Friedrich produced vast and mysterious landscapes and seascapes with signature motifs of moonlit skies, Gothic ruins, isolated figures, and misty panoramas that explored the theme of human helplessness against the forces of nature. The first major comprehension exhibit of the artist called “The Painter of Stillness “ to be presented in the United States.
“The most significant German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich brilliantly illuminates our understanding of the natural world as a spiritual and emotional landscape,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer.
Max boasts, “This very first major retrospective in the United States of Germany’s most beloved painter follows the celebrations of Friedrich’s work in Europe on the occasion of the artist’s 250th birthday in 2024. We are thrilled to collaborate with our German museum colleagues and many other generous lenders on this rare opportunity to reflect on Friedrich’s portrayals of nature and the human condition.”
Beginning with his career as a printmaker and draftsman in Dresden, Germany the collection explores themes through his four-decade career; spirituality and religion; the experience of the infinite and unknowable; the passage of time and mortality; solitude and companionship in nature; and the mixture of beauty and danger that the Romantics called the sublime. Frederich made his professional breakthrough, submitting ambitious ink-wash drawings of the spare coastal landscape island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea to public exhibitions in Dresden and Weimar.
Although solitude was an important theme in his art at The Dresden Academy of Art, where he became a member and later a professor, Caspar became a part of a creative community of artists with whom creative practices exchanged ideas and methods. During this period, the companionship that shaped Friedrich’s art is documented in drawings made while sketching alongside other artists and commemorated in paintings such as The Met’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon.
For the first time together two iconic works of the German Romantic movement from museums loaned for the exhibition are Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Hamburger Kunsthalle) and one of his most extraordinary meditations on faith and solitude Monk by the Sea (Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). Both canvasses articulate a profound connection between the natural world and the inner self, or soul.
Spectacular drawings deploy to evoke solitude, melancholy, and longing, View of Arkona with Rising Moon (The Albertan Museum, Vienna) shows his technical virtuosity and alignment with the Romantic taste for mood and mystery.
Friedrich’s works assail “the unknowable hereafter… the darkness of the future! Which is only ever sacred intuition, to be seen and recognized only in belief.”
Friedrich’s interest in the passage of time is depicted in Dolmen in Autumn (Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), which conjoins nature’s cycles with the rhythms of human life and history. Intrigued by winter, Friedrich created numerous works that capture the season’s subtle colors and evoke duality with death and rebirth.
Encapsulating this dynamic is Moonrise over the Sea (Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), in which figures onshore gaze across an expanse of water toward incoming ships and, beyond them, the horizon, Friedrich evokes the promise of self-discovery within nature.
An avid hiker, Friedrich’s paintings appealed to the Romantic period’s interest in lofty mountain peaks and the mixture of beauty, danger, and awe of high elevations in The Watzmann (Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; loaned by Deka, Frankfurt am Main).
Falling out of favor as the era changed Caspar’s canvases continued structuring his compositions around swaths of land, water, and sky including his later canvases, among them The Evening Star (Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurter Goethe Museum, Frankfurt am Main).
In the end, challenged by health issues from a stroke his intimate perceptions of the individual and the natural world are seen in his work, The Stages of Life (Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig), a poignant meditation on family, mortality, and generational continuity.
After the exhibition preview on February 3rd, Germany Travel hosted a three-course luncheon complemented by select German wines at the Liederkranz Club on the Upper East Side. The Liederkranz Club began 175 years ago and was founded by 25 German heritage singers to promote artistic endeavors and good fellowship.
The buzz at the table was the destination travel to Germany in the footsteps of Casper David Friedrich’s life. The guided tours of his birthplace Greifswald, The Caspar David Friedrich Trail. The Isle of Rügen, where he romanced his wife Caroline, and the mountains he hiked solitary or with his Dresden artists friends. Friedrich’s art presents the beauty of nature in his homeland as an inspiration for personal and philosophical discovery. Friedrich painted numerous scenes with the expressive power of perspective, light, color, and atmosphere, inspired by the geography and daily life of places well known to him.
Friedrich shared his creative philosophy “The task of a work of art is to recognize the spirit of nature and, with one’s whole heart and intention, to saturate oneself with it and absorb it and give it back again in the form of a picture.”
Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature presents 75 works of art; oil paintings, finished drawings, and working sketches from every phase of the artist’s extraordinary journey and enduring artistic legacy.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States dedicated to the nineteenth-century German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, which will be on view through May 11, 2025.
All artwork images courtesy of Met Museum
