Caspar David Friedrich: ‘A picture must not be invented, it must be felt’

It’s the most famous German painting of the 19th century — arguably of any century. Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1817) depicts a solitary figure standing on a rocky promontory. He looks out over a vast, mist-shrouded mountain landscape, which seems to stretch into the distance ad infinitum. An icon of Romanticism, he is humanity’s humble representative before the awesome majesty of nature.

The wanderer has his back to us — making him what’s known in art-historical terms as a Rückenfigur. Painting figures from behind was nothing new in Friedrich’s day, but he helped popularise it, deploying many Rückenfiguren through his career. Denied a glimpse of their face, the viewer is left guessing what the subjects make of the scene before them.

To a large extent, these subjects are unknowable — much like Friedrich himself. He’s renowned for reimagining landscape painting through his portrayal of the natural world as a place for profound emotional encounters. However, knowing quite how to interpret those encounters has never been easy.

‘Friedrich’s imagery is full of feelings, but he never reveals what the feelings are,’ says the German art historian Holger Birkholz. ‘On one level, his pictures are aesthetically pleasing. However, on another, they’re codes that need to be deciphered. This has fascinated different generations of viewers — and confused them frequently, too.’

This year is the 250th anniversary of Friedrich’s birth, an event that is being marked by a trio of major exhibitions in Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden (the three cities with the most extensive holdings of his work). Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age, at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, explored the relationship between man and nature in the artist’s oeuvre. It closed in April, having attracted 335,000 visitors, more than any show in that venue’s 200-year history.

There is a certain amount of overlap between the three exhibitions, but the show currently on at Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie — Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes — is nearest to what one might call a career retrospective. It closes in August, the same month that the Dresden show opens across two venues (the Albertinum and the Kupferstich-Kabinett). Curated by Birkholz, Caspar David Friedrich: Where it all started will consider the artist’s links with the Saxonian city he called home for more than four decades.

‘By the end of the year, we can’t promise visitors the key to understanding the paintings,’ Birkholz says. ‘However, we hope they will have gained a fuller appreciation of Friedrich and his importance.’

The son of a soap-maker, Friedrich was born in 1774 in the town of Greifswald on the Baltic coast. He lost his mother and a number of siblings at an early age — including his younger brother, Johann Christoffer, who drowned while trying to save Caspar David’s life after the latter had fallen through the ice while skating on a frozen pond.

Friedrich went on to study at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen, before settling in Dresden in 1798. He counted Goethe among his early champions, and King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia and Tsar Nicholas I of Russia among his patrons once his career was established.

When it came to the creative process, the artist advised ‘closing your physical eye, so you see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light what you saw in the dark.’

Put another way, ‘A picture must not be invented, it must be felt,’ he wrote. A keen hiker, Friedrich travelled widely across the German countryside, filling sketchbook after sketchbook as he did so, with detailed drawings of oak trees, thistles, rock formations and more. These motifs would then be worked into composite landscapes back in his studio. Friedrich’s scenes may be realistic, but they are not real.

A stunning example of this is The Watzmann (1824-25), a painting ostensibly of the eponymous mountain in the Berchtesgaden Alps, one of the highest peaks in Germany. It is, in fact, an amalgam of different mountains.

Friedrich’s landscapes were artistic constructions — just as the sun-kissed 17th-century idealisations of Claude Lorrain had been in the same genre. Unlike the Frenchman, however, he wasn’t much interested in anything so classical as linear perspective or vanishing points. He was wont to locate viewers in an ambiguous space, often with our vision partially blocked by a boulder, a blasted tree or a Rückenfigur in the foreground.

As for colour, Friedrich was a master of subtly gradated tones (rather than chromatic variety), and this helped create a certain mood. Often there is no human presence at all.

It’s worth pausing to consider also the intellectual context in which Friedrich worked: the German Enlightenment. The old Christian conception of a heavenly and hellish beyond, as well as the immortality of the soul, was coming under serious question. The author Karl Philipp Moritz claimed that there was a ‘boarded-up wall’ preventing human knowledge of life after death. Immanuel Kant asserted the ‘obscurity of all views that transcend the limits of this life’.

One popular interpretation of Friedrich’s landscapes is that they represent a rejoinder to such thinking — inspired by the pantheistic sermons of the preacher Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, who saw natural phenomena as divine revelations.

The political climate of the day is noteworthy too. This was the age of the French Revolution; the Holy Roman Empire’s dissolution; the Napoleonic Wars (during which Dresden was occupied by French troops, whom Friedrich disliked and took to the Elbe Sandstone Mountains in order to avoid); and the Congress of Vienna (which reorganised Europe and saw the establishment of the German Confederation, a loose alliance of 39 sovereign states).

Writing in the catalogue accompanying the current exhibition in Berlin, the Alte Nationalgalerie’s director Ralph Gleis describes Friedrich in quasi-existentialist terms: ‘Against tumultuous times… the powerfully articulated quietude in his works resembles an attentiveness to what lies within. Who am I in all of this commotion?’ In such a vein, let’s remember that Samuel Beckett was an admirer of Friedrich’s, and his 1952 play Waiting for Godot was partly inspired by the painting Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1819-20).

Towards the end of Friedrich’s life, the demand for his paintings dropped — and in the decades following his death in 1840, he was all but forgotten. Taste now shifted towards realism, exemplified by members of the so-called Düsseldorf School.

It wasn’t until 1906 — the year of a large exhibition of German art from the late 18th to the late 19th century, at the Alte Nationalgalerie — that his painting was rediscovered. The institution’s then director spoke of his ‘astonishment’ at encountering the artist’s work, which he hailed as a precursor to modernism.

One need only look at a picture such as The Monk by the Sea (1808-10) to see what he meant. A radically simple composition, it consists essentially of just a beach, the sea and the sky arranged in three horizontal bands (with the minuscule figure of a monk standing on a dune).

Fast-forward to the 1930s, and Friedrich’s art was co-opted for propaganda purposes by the Nazis, who saw his sublime landscapes through the prism of nostalgia for a warped German past. (Hitler was a fan — and oversaw the purchase of The Watzmann by the Nationalgalerie in 1937 following its enforced sale by the Jewish collector Martin Brunn. The painting would be restituted to Brunn’s heirs in 2003.)

Because of the unfortunate Nazi association, Friedrich’s stock fell after the Second World War. However, it recovered in due course, thanks in part to the US art historian Robert Rosenblum, whose landmark book Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (1975) suggested a line of artistic influence from the titular Abstract Expressionist back to the titular German. (Squint your eyes when looking at a work as elemental as The Monk by the Sea, and you might convince yourself that you are looking at one of Rothko’s abstractions.)

In the 21st century, Friedrich’s landscapes have found relevance again, connected to debates around the environment. In 2023, climate-change protesters entered the Hamburg Kunsthalle, home of Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, and left behind their own version of that painting, in which the lone subject now sees fires ravaging the landscape before him.

‘With the passage of time, meanings can sometimes be attributed to an artist’s work that that artist never expected,’ Birkholz says. In Friedrich’s case, he created imagery so rich and layered that people have consistently found new meanings in it — over a period of 200-plus years and counting.

Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes is at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin until 4 August 2024

Caspar David Friedrich: Where it all started is at the Kupferstich-Kabinett (24 August to 17 November 2024) and the Albertinum (24 August 2024 to 5 January 2025) in Dresden

Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, the largest ever Friedrich exhibition to be held in the United States, runs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from 8 February to 11 May 2025