By Ulrike Lemmin-Woolfrey, to Museum Spotlight Europe (January 2024)
My earliest memory of an art museum is that of being dragged at a young age into the Louvre in Paris by my dad, during a road trip through France. He propped me up in front of a small painting of a bare tree standing dark against a luminous sky, and told me that the artist, Caspar David Friedrich, was an ancestor of ours on my father’s mother’s side. While I have forgotten the exact branch of our family tree linking me to Friedrich, I never forgot the mysterious tree in that painting, The Tree of Crows (1822).
Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), is Germany’s most prominent painter of the Romanticism era, which includes painters such as William Blake, Eugene Delacroix, Francisco Goya, J.M.W. Turner. The artistic, literary, and intellectual movement originated in Europe during the late 18th century and lasted until the mid-19th century. It is characterised by an emphasis on emotions, individualism, imagination, and nature. Often, this era incorporates elements of the supernatural and the mysterious, reflecting a fascination with the unknown and the unseen. Friedrich was a true master of capturing light, landscapes, and mystical scenes enhanced by everyday weather phenomena such as fog, moonlight, or clouds.
September 5, 2024 celebrates Friedrich’s 250th birthday, and the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the northern city’s art museum located between the two inner-city Alster lakes, is pulling out all the stops for the occasion. Here, visitors find a three-part exhibition, Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age, which spreads across the two main buildings of the museum and is open until April 1, 2024.
The central theme of the exhibition is the unique relationship between man and nature showcased in Friedrich’s landscape depictions. The second part, on the second floor, and in the Markart Saal, is dedicated to the connectivity of Friedrich’s works for contemporary art, especially with regard to the challenges of our time, climate change, and our impact on nature. This part of the exhibition shows cross-genre and cross-media works by 21 artists inspired by his works.
The third part, an interactive display titled ‘Kosmos Caspar,’ invites visitors to get involved in various activities, from touching and drawing, to learning and thinking about our relationship with nature.
The main exhibition to celebrate Friedrich’s work starts with a room of portraits of the artist. Some by other painters, some self-portraits. It is a great start to the show, to have an idea what the man himself looked like, and seeing that, despite many art experts’ claims that Friedrich was inept at painting faces, due to his paintings featuring mostly people seen from behind, he proved those experts wrong right from the start.
The Kunsthalle exhibition brings together more than 100 drawings, sketches, and studies, plus over 60 paintings, showcasing Friedrich’s painstaking research, practise, and resulting, stunning artworks. Friedrich was nothing if not prolific, with more than 500 major works to his name, and it is humbling to see quite how many of those the curators have managed to bring together in this one exhibition.
A little reminiscent of the sketch folders at the Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris, it is wonderful to witness that, while undoubtedly talented, even famous artists have to practise and practise; They must work over and over on creating leaves in various positions and angles, and trying to get all the small details just so. Throughout the exhibition, the curators often placed sketches and practise drawings next to the end result, adding a touch of reality to the life and work of the artist.
Starting with Friedrich’s early works, his experimental approaches range from watercolours to woodcuts with a distinct attraction to nature and detailed studies of foliage and gardens. But also, in the vein of Romanticism, he connects nature with emotions, showing a range of melancholy drawings, even despairing motifs. These are surely possible because of Friedrich’s formal training with drawing teacher, Johann Gottfried Quistorp, at the University of Greifswald and his subsequent studies at the Academy in Copenhagen between 1794 and 1798.
One of his best-loved motifs are those of the Baltic Island of Rügen, not far from his birth town of Greifswald. He visited and studied the island intensively, resulting in paintings of views and vistas, seascapes and cliffs, sunrises, and moon-lit scenes. From these themes, he moved on to mountain scenes, depictions of religious buildings, and always beautiful clouds and trees. Whether it is a ruined abbey, or a scene of a group of women watching the sunset over the sea perched on a rock, or simply a forest at night, the light Friedrich captures is simply magical. Be it mist, fog, clouds, or moonlight, he brings nature’s spectacles to life in oils, like few others. With simple tricks such as slightly off centering the full moon peeking out from behind trees in the woods, he breathes life into a scene which otherwise might have been too clichéd and symmetrical. While at the same time, he suggests a depth of field that is nearly three dimensional.
With paintings on loan from many major museums around the world, this exhibition not only chronicles Friedrich’s development and progress as an artist, but also brings together some of his best known works. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, probably his most easily recognised work, has in fact a permanent home at the Kunsthalle, and sums up all Friedrich is known for: the light, the clouds, the person only seen from behind. Others, such as the somewhat gloomy The Monk by the Sea, is on loan from Dresden’s collection, and the iconic The Chalk Cliffs of Rügen, again, showcasing his management of depicting a depth of field, the beautiful nature, and people only seen from the back, is on loan from the Kunstmuseum Winterthur.
Following on from the main exhibition of Friedrich’s original works, is another section, featuring contemporary artists who have been inspired by his work. From paintings to photographs, to perfect little dioramas, and even a miniature cloud seemingly suspended in a plexiglass box, and modern interpretations of his most iconic paintings, his far reach has even surprised me, a lifelong fan. Artists such as Olafur Eliasson, represented in the exhibition with his Colour Experiment No. 86, a simple circular canvas, pay tribute to Friedrich’s use of subtle blends of colour. Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus staged herself as The Wanderer 1 to 3, standing as Friedrich’s Wanderer did, high above cliffs, coat fluttering in the breeze, but never quite glimpsed from anywhere but the back.
Even if you are not too familiar with this artist’s work, you will be surprised by how many pictures you recognize, proving that Friedrich, so famous and revered in Germany, and known throughout Europe, has indeed made his mark beyond the borders of Europe’s Romanticism movement. That said, there are three of his paintings listed in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, but none are on view. Maybe this will change in his anniversary year.
There is hope that his 250th anniversary year will see Friedrich’s fame spreading, with Germany certainly set to truly mark this occasion. This exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle is only the start of the year-long celebrations, which also include: Infinite Landscapes at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and Caspar David Friedrich. Where it all started at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. All three exhibitions hold the world’s most important collections of Friedrich’s work among them; Each institution is dedicating a show to the artist during 2024, focusing on different themes.
While ‘my’ Tree of Crows is sadly not one of Friedrich’s paintings that are on show in the Hamburg exhibition, I took the opportunity to fall in love with another tree painting while there, The Solitary Tree (1822), which is on loan from the Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin. Personal regard for my ancestor’s talent for capturing nature at its most atmospheric has gone up manyfold since seeing this exhibition. Now I just need to get tickets to the other two shows in Berlin and Dresden to round this experience off.
Cover photo: Installation view of the exhibition CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH. Art for a New Age, Hamburger Kunsthalle, December 15, 2023, to April 1, 2024, Kehinde Wiley, The Prelude (Ibrahima Ndiaye and El Hadji Malick Gueye), 2021 Courtesy of Rennie Collection, Vancouver © Kehinde Wiley / Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photo: © Hamburger Kunsthalle, Fred Dott
