One says Friedrich and immediately thinks of the “Wanderer on the sea of fog”, an emblematic work of Romanticism in painting. Today the world of art remembers his birth, which took place on 5 September 1774. Prisoner of a deep melancholy dating back to the years of his childhood and childhood, marred by various deaths in the family, Friedrich fills with painting, the need to express his inner restlessness and awareness of the presence of death in human and natural things
MILAN – On 5 September 1774 in Greifswald in Germany, Caspar David Friedrich was born, German painter, exponent of romantic art. Considered one of the main representatives of the “symbolic landscape”, he based his painting on a careful observation of landscapes and above all of their light effects; permeating them with romantic moods. Friedrich considered the natural landscape to be a divine work and his representations always portrayed particular moments such as dawn, sunset or the breaking of a storm. THE BEGINNINGS– Caspar’s childhood was certainly very difficult and tragic, marked by various deaths that affected his family: first his mother, then a sister, a brother, and finally another sister (Friedrich initially had 9 brothers). Together with these circumstances and his youthful romantic readings, the painter’s singular melancholy is traced back. He takes drawing lessons and very early dabbles in watercolor paintings of parks and picturesque English gardens and many self-portraits and portraits of family members in pen or pencil. After a short stay in Berlin, in October 1798 he settled in Dresden, home to a famous art gallery, where he spends whole days admiring the works of Jacob van Ruisdael, Nicolas Poussin and Gaspard Dughet. THE YEARS OF SUCCESS– After numerous works, in 1809 the “Monk by the sea” ends, which he modifies the following year, changing it into a nocturnal one, with the crescent moon and the morning star and eliminating the images of two ships. From the same year and also “L’Abbazia nel Querceto”: both paintings were purchased by King Frederick William III of Prussia; and in November his father dies. On 18 September 1810 Friedrich receives a visit from Goethe in his study: the poet notes in his diary the strong impression received by the “Monk on the beach” and by the “Abbey in the oak wood”; and from a poem by Goethe, the “Shepherd’s Lament”, which Friedrich draws inspiration for his “Landscape with a rainbow”, who died in 1945; where the rainbow symbolizes reconciliation with God. In 1818, a year of notable increase in his artistic activity, Caspar creates two well-known paintings: the “Wanderer on the Sea of Fog” and “The White Cliffs of Rugen”. The painting of the Wayfarer, beyond any symbolic-religious revelation, can be understood as the manifesto of all early Romanticism: the lonely man, with his errors, his doubts and his certainties, placed in front of nature , to the world, to infinity.ILLNESS AND DEATH – On January 19, 1824, Friedrich was appointed professor of the Dresden Academy, although he never taught there. Meanwhile, the artist shows the first symptoms of a disease whose precise nature has remained unknown, with a paranoid-obsessive character. However, he paints some of his best-known paintings of himself, such as “The Sea of Ice”, now in Hamburg, which he exhibits in Prague, Dresden, Hamburg and Berlin. In the Pole, where the succession of days and seasons is canceled, everything is eternal and this eternity of ice, where the ship, symbol of the season of human life, is imprisoned, cannot escape that eternity which is the same as God. Friedrich dies on 7 May and is buried in the Trinity Cemetery in Dresden. STYLE– His paintings, in which you can see an obsessive attention to detail, are in break with the rules of the time, they foresee only two floors (and no longer three): on the first floor there is immediately the background, which thus appears so far away from seem unreachable and infinite. Hence, the estrangement of vision, which is lost in the distance that it is unable to grasp, to dominate, often to understand. In Friedrich’s paintings the maxim is the expression of the sublime, of the mysterious, of the unknown, always based on the life of feelings, on the relationship between man and nature, on individual solitude and the communion of the universe. Friedrich’s greatness lies precisely in the ability to unify the two opposite factors, to create an organism in which they coexist and indeed live, one in the other, with no more possibility of detachment, in the totality expressed by each of his works. It is the balance that is achieved in the Stimmung, the state of grace, in that state in which the soul is in a harmonious situation and participates in the harmony of the world.5 September 2014
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED
