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You know the work of Caspar David Friedrich even if you dont think you do.
Friedrich is the painter par excellence of German Romanticism yet also a man for all times and places.
What might the spirits eye behold in these pictures now?
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.
He drew outdoors but painted in his studio from memory and imagination.
At 44, he married a woman 19 years his junior, with whom he had three children.
He died in 1840, forgotten, out of style, in financial straits.
The Nazis, unfortunately, saw in Friedrichs expansive landscapes images of Aryan living space.
He was discredited, only to be rediscovered in the late 1970s.
Friedrich came of age during the early Romantic period, influenced by neoclassicism.
Europe emerged exhausted after Waterloo in 1815.
Friedrich once referred to the darkness of the futurethis is the pessimism that dominates his art and his epoch.
There is a very low horizon one of the hallmarks of his work.
(It is no wonder that many have commented on Friedrichs influence on Rothko.)
A lone, windblown monk stands on the shore, staring into the abyss.
Friedrichs lucidity is the foundation of his art.
Friedrich is about cosmological grandeur, and in his best work we commune with the bigness of it all.
Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11.
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