Revolution Presentation Script

REVOLUTION PRESENTATION SCRIPT

Casper David Friedrich’s Ideological Landscapes

ROSIE: Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840) was a 19th century German Romantic landscape painter and is generally considered the most important German artist of his generation.

Born in the Pomeranian town of Greifswald, by the Baltic Sea, Friedrich started his studies in art in Copenhagen until 1798, before re-locating to Dresden. He came of age during a period when there was a growing sense of disillusionment with materialistic society and this is evident in the events of the French Revolution (1789-99). As a result, there developed a new appreciation of spirituality which brought about a shift in the depiction of the natural world in art of that time.

Artists such as John Constable, J.M.W. Turner and Friedrich himself sought to depict nature as a “divine creation, to be set against the artifice of human civilisation.” (Vaughan, 2004, p.7) He was best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes, typically featuring contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists and other aspects of nature that, up until this time, had not been represented in such great detail or ardour.

Friedrich’s work brought hum renown early on in his career and his contemporaries, for example French sculptor David d’Angers (1788-1865), spoke of him as a man who discovered “the tragedy of landscape”. Despite this his work lost popularity and he died in obscurity.

As an artist his primary interest was the contemplation of nature and this is evident through the majority works tendency to symbolise and reject classicism. His often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich’s paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscape in a bid to represent the sublime beauty of nature.

Friedrich sought not just to explore the blissful enjoyment of a beautiful view, as previous generations had beforehand, but rather to examine an instant of sublimity, a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature. He was instrumental in transforming landscapes in art from a backdrop subordinated to human drama, to a self-contained emotive subject. This was represented by a figure, seen from behind, staring out into the distance in pensive or contemplative thought. This Rückenfigur, encourages the viewer to take his place and experience the scene as perceived and idealised by a human.

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The Status of Landscape:

• During the early nineteenth century landscape painting, which had previously been considered one of the ‘lesser’ genres, emerged as a principle means of artistic expression.
• It was Romantic artists who first asserted the supreme importance of landscape.
• Philipp Otto Runge, a German romantic painter exclaimed in 1802 “everything is becoming more airy and light than before,… everything gravitates towards landscape’ – predicting the common theme of the century.
• So, the Romantic landscape suggested a new direction.
• The hardest challenge for Romantic painters was the claim that it was incapable of representing ennobling events or ideas like historical paintings.
• Landscape artists often asserted the importance of ‘content’ for landscape stating that the forms of nature could in itself have such deep significance.

Man and Nature:

• At its simplest, this assertion involved a straightforward challenge to the subordination of nature to man implicit in traditional classical landscape.
• Richter’s approach introduced the key issue: that of how far nature could convey thoughts and emotions: and how far natural imagery can reflect man’s actions.
• Each artist, in seeking to present the heightened awareness of nature, showed a leaning towards to areas

1. One that they were to either intensify or to overwhelm the awareness
2. Or two that they were to present the contemplation of nature as a visionary or dramatic experience.

Friedrich and Landscape:  

• Friedrich’s art began with an intimate knowledge of nature. He first made his name as a topographical draughtsman and only gradually moved to more ambitious work.
• Catholic tendencies began to find a resonance in his art, as natural images were placed in juxtaposition to crosses, Gothic buildings and religious processions.
• This tendency did not sit well with critics as they were disturbed by the way that Friedrich attempted to force landscape to express an explicit allegory and by the liberties that he took with the conventions of landscape composition.
• In some of his art, the organisation of the composition, shows Friedrich had found a way to heighten the drama of landscape so that it no longer requires the presence of some human event to make its meaning explicit. The forms of nature themselves have become the protagonist.

Winter Landscape:

• This painting was discovered in a private collection in 1982, and was acquired by the national gallery 5 years later.
• (Next slide) The painting appeared identical in nearly every respect to a version that had been in the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund since 1940. Yet only one version of the composition was recorded in 19th-century documents, so which painting was the original?
• Although the two paintings appear at first glance to be identical, there are minute details in the London painting that do not appear in the Dortmund picture. The most noticeable are the gateway in front of the church and the blades of grass poking through the melting snow in the foreground.
• The distant church is rendered with exceptional clarity and detail in the London painting, comparable to similar structures in other works by Friedrich. The same feature in the Dortmund version is little more than a hazy silhouette, with no discernable architectural features. While the Dortmund painting is rendered with a broad, spontaneous touch, the precise, controlled handling of the Gallery’s work in fact relates more closely to Friedrich’s early style of painting.

Friedrich’s Technique:

• Friedrich began his career as a draughtsman, and when he turned to oil painting in 1807 he simply adapted his usual methods to the new medium. He applied the oil paint in thin, transparent washes over a delicate underdrawing, and many of the works he produced resemble coloured drawings more than paintings. He used a range of marks and patterns, such as short, hatched strokes, stippling (paint applied in tiny points or dots) and a selective use of thickly textured paint, or impasto, to convey the surfaces and forms of nature.
• Friedrich took similar pains with the choice of pigments he used in ‘Winter Landscape’. Much of the scene is painted using just a few pigments – lead white, red earth and different grades of smalt – suggesting that a subtle gradation of tones, rather than colouristic variety, was a priority in creating this evocative scene.
• The use of smalt is particularly interesting. Although synthetic blue pigments such as cobalt and Prussian blue were popular and readily available, Friedrich probably chose the more traditional smalt for its translucent quality. He applied the paint in delicate stippled strokes that scatter the light, recreating the dissolving textures of a vaporous winter landscape.

Exploring the Underdrawing:

• Recent improvements in infrared imaging have allowed a better understanding of the underdrawing of ‘Winter Landscape’. A slightly freer preliminary sketch – which appears paler in the infrared reflectogram – was reinforced with a stronger line marking the final placement of details. Both were executed in a liquid medium, probably with a brush. The basic structure of the church was marked out in the underdrawing with thin ruled lines. The church was painted in grey with details crisply drawn in black, then ‘veiled’ by the misty colours of the sky paint.
• Although extensive underdrawing is a characteristic feature of Friedrich’s paintings, none is visible in an infrared photograph of the Dortmund painting. This distinctly separates that work from other paintings by Friedrich that have been studied by infrared imaging. The Dortmund ‘Winter Landscape’ is probably a replica by Friedrich himself or possibly by a pupil or imitator; its fidelity to the original suggests that it may even have been made while the National Gallery painting was still in Friedrich’s studio in Dresden.

Another key work that illustrates these stylistic features is the ‘Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog’ of 1818. Often suggested to being a self-portrait of Friedrich himself, the composition consists of a young man standing in contemplation above a valley succumbed by the mist. He stands in self-reflection, mesmerized by the haze of sea of fog below him as if it were a religious and spiritual experience. He wonders in that moment about the unforeseen future, evident in the uncertainty of what’s below him and the reality that it will eventually become clearer. By turning his back on the viewer he does not shut them out, but rather enables them to see the world through his eyes, to share and convey his personal experience.