Caspar David Friedrich
The Soul of Nature
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
By Joanna Seifter, March 27, 2025
Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1808-10. Oil on canvas. Image Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer publicly, and illegally performs Nazi salutes in each of his Occupations (1969) performances against various German backdrops. Born in 1945 and raised in West Germany, Kiefer confronts the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust, questioning the often oversimplified and abnegating motivations behind postwar Germany’s imperative of vergangenheitsbewältigung (“overcoming the past”). Kiefer’s Occupations performances are part of his Heroic Symbols mixed-media series, a title borrowed from Nazi art historian Robert Scholz’s 1943 essay venerating artwork that upholds German Volksgemeinschaft, or a fascistic “national community.” By applying it to the gesture of a fallen dictatorship presented in all its austere monochromatism, Kiefer’s Heroic Symbols title reads as ironic, calling attention to Nazi Germany’s devastating impact and hollow dogma.
In one Occupation, Kiefer stands with his back to the viewer, wearing formal attire on the rocky shores of choppy waters, his arm still visibly saluting to the horizon line. Here, Kiefer invokes Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), the tempestuous landscape painting of a suited man peering across a mountainous cloudscape that emerged as the prevailing image of German Romanticism. Friedrich’s work would later come to represent Nazism as well - Hitler appropriated Friedrich’s German landscapes (which were, in part, nationalistic responses to Germany’s liberation from France after the Napoleonic Wars), perversely distorting them into Aryan fantasies.
Though Friedrich’s passing preceded the Nazis’ ascent to power by nearly a century, and he never publicly supported politics that would have aligned with Hitler’s, the public continued equating Friedrich’s landscapes with Nazi ideology, and his work fell into uncomfortable obscurity. Kiefer’s interpolation of Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog visualizes, challenges, and rejects Friedrich’s diminished, stagnated legacy amidst quiet postwar German denialism. Instead, Kiefer offers Friedrich as an alternative artistic and intellectual “heroic symbol” for Germany to reclaim proudly. Rather than condemning Friedrich’s oeuvre for the Nazi ideologies it had been unjustly burdened with, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature celebrates it for its sincere if mythologized, confluence of environment and spirituality. The (long-past due) first extensive Friedrich retrospective in the United States features over seventy drawings, prints, and paintings placed on mauve walls dappled with warm spotlights, unfurling a radiance and sentimentality not typically associated with his work.
The exhibition forms a clear timeline of Friedrich’s stylistic and thematic evolution, dedicating the first third of the gallery’s space to Friedrich’s earlier work. The monochromatic ink landscapes Friedrich made in his 20s, softened by overcast natural light, herald the sublime yet introspective landscapes he was later known for. For example, View of Arkona with Rising Moon (1805-6), a dazzling seascape, faintly masks a repressed turbulence lurking beneath the sun-dappled ocean. Other paintings, like the Statue of the Madonna in the Mountains, whose layers of foreground, mid-ground, and background gradually melt into visibility, are suffused with a film photography-esque sfumato and granularity.
Anselm Kiefer, Occupations, 1969. Photograph, black and white, on paper. Image, Courtesy Tate and National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, ca. 1818. Oil on canvas. Image Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
While Friedrich produced many landscapes with blunt Christian imagery, with titles like The Cross in the Mountains (1806) and Cross in the Forest (1812), he also merged iconography with the land. In Ruins at Oybin (1812), Friedrich trades his wayward crucifixes for chipped attenuated arches that form silhouettes of saints. Here, Friedrich imbues his humble, dilapidated landscape with sanctitude by enlivening the tapered arches with the intense glow of an equally comforting and frightening sunset. More often, Friedrich eschewed the binaries of sacred and verisimilitude altogether, depicting preternaturally uninhabited landscapes with understated resplendence. In Meadows near Greifswald (1821-22), Friedrich presents a picturesque yet unsentimental juxtaposition of verdant plains with a looming metropolis studded with church steeples. Monk by the Sea (1808-1810) imbues piety with a gothic, volatile air of contemplation - the sky, opaque with clouds, barely veils the subject’s ominous surroundings, telegraphing his latent turmoil. Similarly, the clouds in Dolmen in Autumn (1820) angle and lurch towards the mossy gravestone like the gusts of a cyclone, signifying either a climate or a cosmic shift.
The Soul of Nature occasionally juxtaposes Friedrich’s work with his contemporaries’, underscoring the distinctiveness of his quietly momentous approach to landscape painting. Toward the beginning of the exhibition, we see Friedrich’s Rock Arch in the Uttewalder Grund (1803) hanging alongside Johann Moritz Gottfried Jentzsch’s Travelers at the Rock Arch in the Uttewalder Grund (1804). While both monochromatic ink paintings were produced at roughly the same time and feature figures hiking through the same landscape, Jentzsch’s work emphasizes who the travelers are more than Friedrich’s. Jentzch portrays his travelers as wayward aristocrats, rendering every luxurious drapery fold, flamboyant accessory, and curled facial hair with quilled precision and positions them closer to the foreground. He communicates the beauty and enormity of a secluded, unfamiliar landscape through the figures’ astounded facial expressions and body language. Friedrich’s painting, in contrast, positions the figures further back in the scene, making them appear silhouetted and small against the landscape's vastness, allowing the beauty of nature to take center stage.
The rough shift from winter to spring transforms New York City’s sharp landscapes into their own moody versions reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's work. A stillness persists in the early mornings between howling gusts of wind, low-hanging mist blankets, softening protruding glass skyscrapers, and signs of hope and growth cling to every barren branch and budding flower box - optimism triumphing uncertainty, even as it stretches past the horizon perpetually beyond our reach.
Johann Moritz Gottfried Jentzsch, Travelers at the Rock Arch in the Uttewalder Grund, 1804. Brown ink and wash on wove paper. Image Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Caspar David Friedrich, Rock Arch in the Uttewalder Grund, ca. 1803. Brown ink and wash over pencil on wove paper. Image Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.