Thu
17th
17th
Dec
2009
2009
What does it mean to say that Caspar David Friedrich is a quintessentially Romantic painter? Certainly his paintings embody a range of tastes, beliefs and attitudes commonly associated with the historical movement termed German Romanticism: a heightened sensitivity to the natural world, combined with a belief in nature’s correspondence to the mind; a passion for the equivocal, the indeterminate, the obscure and the faraway (objects shrouded in fog, a distant fire in the darkness, mountains merging with clouds, etc.); a celebration of subjectivity bordering on solipsism, often coupled with a morbid desire that that self be lost in nature’s various infinities; an infatuation with death; valorization of night over day, emblematizing a reaction against Enlightenment and rationalism; a nebulous but all-pervading mysticism; and a melancholy, sentimental longing or nostalgia which can border on kitsch.
— from Koerner’s Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (page 23)
