"Whenever a storm with thunder and lightning moved over the sea, he would hurry out to the top of the cliffs as if he had a pact of friendship with the forces of nature, or even went on into the oakwood where the lightning had split a tall tree from top to bottom, which led him to murmur: 'How great, how mighty, how wonderful!' " Thus a friend remembered the wanderings of
Caspar David Friedrich as a young painter on the Baltic island of Rugen in 1802. It was Friedrich's favorite posture: Homo romanticus out in the weather, saluting the crag.
A soapmaker's son who was born in the seaport of Greifswald in 1774 and died obscure and slightly mad in Dresden in 1840, Friedrich was one of the most German artists Germany produced in the 19th century. He never made the obligatory journey south to study in Rome; his subject matter was the foggy and precipitous vista, sublimely expansive and filled with premonitory brooding. The writer Ludwig Tieck believed Friedrich was the Nordic genius incarnate, whose mission was "to express and suggest most sensitively the solemn sadness and religious stimulus which seem recently to be reviving our German world in a strange way." This month a retrospective of Friedrich's work —about 230 paintings and studies —opened in Frankfurt, reviving a man without whose work the romantic impulse in art cannot be fully understood.
Fog and Green Velvet. To compare Friedrich as a romantic to his great English contemporaries Turner and Constable is absurd. It also distorts the actual nature of his achievement. English romanticism always had an intensely realistic strain; its ecstasies of involvement with nature came from a meticulous observation of growth and form. This rarely happens with Friedrich, whose work (see color opposite) often had the peculiarly stiff and abstract character of a landscape assembled from prototypes. There is, for example, no way of reading Traveler Looking over the Sea of Fog (circa 1818) as a real scene; with his wind-blown hair and green velvet suit, Friedrich's Byronic wanderer is as incongruous on his craggy perch as a Magritte businessman. He is, instead, that convention of a Friedrich landscape, the awe-struck witness.
Friedrich's work, the Dresden painter Ludwig Richter remarked in 1825, does not deal with "the spirit and importance of nature ... Friedrich chains us to an abstract idea, using the forms of nature in a purely allegorical manner, as signs and hieroglyphs." Like other German Fruhromantiker (early romanticists) of his time, Friedrich had a penchant for introversion and metaphysical generalizations which the more pragmatic English romantics (except men like Blake and Coleridge) did not share. He filled his work with symbolism, most of which is lost to a modern viewer.