A bareheaded man stands dramatically on a rocky outcrop, supported by a walking stick and staring into an alarming vista of jagged crags, scrubby trees, and mountaintops hidden in menacing fog. Painted around 1818, Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is nothing less than a Wertherian statement of communion with the divine as well as a passionate veneration of the natural world and the spiritual awe it inspires.
Friedrich’s most famous painting is one of the keynote images of German Romanticism—an end-of-century movement that challenged the Enlightenment’s embrace of rationality and science. It also contains a hidden meaning, something of a secret fashion statement. As with many of Friedrich’s paintings of the period, the human subject is wearing a historical clothing style known as Altdeutsche Tracht (old German costume), whose knee-length jackets and baggy trousers were intended to recall the glory years of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, in the early 1500s. In the early 1800s, as Europe emerged from the carnage of the Napoleonic Wars, the adoption of these clothes signified a protest against centuries of imperial rule in Germany’s city-states and principalities. This was the heroic age of liberal nationalism to which Romanticism was perfectly aligned. “As long as we remain serfs to princes,” Friedrich himself wrote in 1814, “nothing great will ever happen.”
The year 2024 is the 250th anniversary of Friedrich’s birth, and German art museums are pushing the boat out for the man whose work—for better or worse—provided the spiritual and emotional underpinning for the country’s national drive in the 19th century. Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is on display in “Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age,” which opened yesterday at Hamburg’s Kunsthalle. On April 19, Berlin’s Old National Gallery shows off its own holdings in the exhibition “Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes.” And on August 24, the Dresden State Art Collections (Friedrich lived in Dresden for 40 years), offers a contextual exhibition in which Friedrich’s landscapes will be shown alongside the paintings that influenced them, by old masters such as Jacob van Ruisdael, Salvator Rosa, and Claude Lorrain. Greifswald, the north-German town where Friedrich grew up, is also joining the hoopla—with a little irony, perhaps, as Greifswald was part of Sweden during Friedrich’s boyhood.
Despite his centrality to Germany’s idea of itself, Friedrich is not a particularly fashionable figure. This may be due to the intense religiosity of his art. His early paintings, for example, often resembled altarpieces, with a crucified Christ wedged on Alpine hilltops, bathed in the symbolic rays of a Northern European sun. Gradually, Friedrich’s visions of vertiginous wildernesses—occasionally decorated with Gothic ruins or tombs of ancient heroes—saw the removal of a contemplative human element. In his celebrated later work The Sea of Ice (circa 1823–24), all that remains of human life is a ship capsized by a remorselessly brutal ice field.
Those who wish to celebrate the anniversary with more muscle can follow in the footsteps of the artist and hike the Caspar David Friedrich Trail, there to brood over the confusingly named Saxon Switzerland hills, outside Dresden. Friedrich’s landscapes are composites rather than exact replicas of natural features, but it is among these mountains that the Wanderer is meditating, with the distinctive mesa of the Zirkelstein lurking on the top right of the picture. Grab your boots and go!
“Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age” is on at the Kunsthalle,
in Hamburg, through April 1
“Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes” will be on at Berlin’s Old National Gallery beginning April 19, 2024. “Caspar David Friedrich: Where It All Started” will be on at the Dresden State Art Collections beginning August 24, 2024
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Andrew Pulver writes about film for The Guardian and about art for The Art Newspaper. He lives in Oxford