Are we having a Romantic moment?
As reactionary winds lash about the vast expanses of the United States, rivers of class resentment empty into occasions of anti-immigrant hate, and a deep longing for an imagined, bygone glory settles heavy like thick fog over a lake, what more fitting show for the nation’s largest museum than an exhibition of the prince of Romanticist kitsch, Caspar David Friedrich?
Intended or not, this largest-to-date US retrospective of Friedrich, spanning over 75 paintings and sepia drawings, coincides with our own neo-Romantic moment: nostalgic to the core, pining to return to nature while scheming to dominate and destroy it, eager to spurn reality in favor of our imagination, suffering from an overactive spleen.
Friedrich and the Romantics lived through uncertain times, rife with painful socio- and geopolitical transitions, as we do now. They revolted against the tyranny of reason and technology’s dizzying advances, and so might we. And just like them, our weary hearts and alienated souls hunger for a touch of the sublime.
Perhaps Friedrich’s Rückenfiguren (figures depicted from behind) can transport you into the awe-inducing sceneries in which he positioned them: the apricot-orange glow of a low-hanging crescent moon, the golden light of the life-giving morning sun, the soft melancholy of a warm day’s sunset, and the heavenly gloom of a dismal sky above a great, brooding sea.
Friedrich’s turned figures are placed at the center of each composition, but they are dwarfed by the glory and menace of nature, their gazes said to be proxies for our own. For me, however, Friedrich’s unpeopled, timeless paintings were a quicker path to the sublime: the mystic chill of “Morning Mist in the Mountains” (1807–8), the arresting simplicity of “Mountain Landscape in Bohemia (c. 1830), and the fair waters in “Rocky Reef off the Seacoast” (c. 1824) glistening musically in the moonlight.
But what is “the sublime,” anyway? Confusing the spiritual with the philosophical is one of those uniquely German problems for which the rest of humanity has had to pay a terrible price. Immanuel Kant, the godfather of reason, distinguished the sublime from beauty and viewed it in cerebral terms of humans’ need to grasp, contain, and dominate nature. It was Friedrich Nietzsche who rejected Kant’s cold-hearted anthropocentrism and advocated for beauty above reason. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), his protagonist asserts that it is incumbent upon the “sublime one” to overcome his ego, “turn away from himself,” and leap over his own shadow “into his sun.”
Like Nietzsche’s ideas, Friedrich’s art was later appropriated by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis (Hitler decorated the Reich Chancellery with Friedrich’s paintings) and twisted into a combustible notion of the Heimat (“homeland”). That episode of history taught us that with the right demagogue, the distance between nostalgia and genocide can be frighteningly short. That’s the danger we face again today with the rise of the nationalist far right in Europe and the US.
The debonair in “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” (c. 1817), Friedrich’s most recognizable painting, stands confidently on a mountaintop, presumably experiencing a transcendental moment as nature lays tame before him. That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that he’s viewing with horror a dark force in the far horizon, just decades away, coming to sweep his homeland and drive its people out of their humanity.
Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through May 11.
