Word: friedrich
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...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...
...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...
...possible to overrate the density of Friedrich's allegories. There is, for example, a German critic's claim that the rock against which the little traveler in Landscape with Rainbow (circa 1809) is leaning is really "the symbol of faith" and that his hat on the ground is "a sign of humility." But often the symbolism is plain enough, as in a well-known picture usually called The Wreck of the "Hope" (circa 1822). Friedrich was inspired, at first, by reports of early expeditions to the North Pole, all of which failed. But the image he produced, with...
Ethical Teacher. In treating landscape as a paradigm of human fate and mood, Friedrich became one of the few major painters in the German romantic movement. The issue then, as posed by the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, was straightforward: "Do not animals, stones, plants, stars and breezes also belong with mankind, which is merely a central meeting point of countless varied threads? Can mankind be understood divorced from nature, and is it so very different from other manifestations of nature?" This, the key question of the romantic sensibility then as of ecology now, was Friedrich's obsession. He pursued...
...Friedrich, nature was an ethical teacher, a repository of religious experience. And when he found his pictures widely ignored (he was not a success in the marketplace), he succumbed to an almost paranoid embitterment, watching "realist" landscape triumph over his ideal form of it in the 1830s. For the naturalists, Friedrich had one last word. "If [the artist] sees nothing within him," he wrote, "then he should also refrain from painting what he sees before him. Otherwise his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which"-startling phrase-"one expects to find only the sick or the dead...