Caspar David Friedrich at the Met, Review: A Worthy US Retrospective

Much as I’m embarrassed to admit it, I love Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, gooey sentimentalism and all. His landscapes—populated often by just one or a few figures, and many featuring radiant suns, craggy mountains, and foreboding seas—summon an outpouring of emotion as they divine metaphors for birth, death, and spiritual rebirth in nature. These pictures tug at the heartstrings, but they don’t exactly provide a lot of food for thought, and that makes them easy to like and tough to defend.

I won’t even try to stand up for some of the paintings in Metropolitan Museum of Art’s survey for Friedrich, the most famous artist associated with the German Romanticism movement. I can’t abide Friedrich’s trite paintings of crosses in the wilderness, surrounded by gnarled branches and rushing rivers, and I can live without his pictures of ruined monasteries and cathedrals cast in ominous darkness. But I can’t forgo this exquisite show altogether, since it makes clear that Friedrich’s paintings, however obvious they may seem, are loaded with ambiguities that make them worthy of further study.

Take the case of one of Friedrich’s most famous paintings, a ca. 1818–24 picture of a woman standing in field before a pinkish sky. Seen from behind, this woman is shown raising her hands and welcoming the sun’s yellow rays. Is she greeting the day or bidding it goodbye? The Met is exhibiting this painting under the title Woman before the Rising or Setting Sun—even though its lender, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, simply calls this work Woman in Front of the Setting Sun.

The titular shift alters the meaning of this painting. With the Folkwang name, you might assume the painting were about someone closing out their moment in the sun—a parallel, perhaps, for moving a step nearer to expiration. But with the Met one, it suddenly seems as though the painting were about something else altogether: an in-between state in which life and death exist side by side. If you believe the work was painted sometime after the birth of Friedrich’s second child, who came into this world stillborn in 1821, and if you think the female figure is a stand-in for Friedrich’s wife Caroline, new multitudes reveal themselves.

Met curators Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein add all sorts of intriguing wrinkles to Friedrich’s work throughout this show (opening February 8), implying that even though this artist’s paintings have been reproduced everywhere, his images still elude us. They deftly show that Friedrich’s crisp, clear imagery was not always so easily legible—it went against the grain during his day, a time when landscape painting didn’t always look like this. And they offer his pictures of people admiring forests and clearings as implicitly political subject matter, with much to say about Germany at a time when its nationhood was subject to debate.

Germany is the place where most of Friedrich’s works are held permanently, and it was the country where, in 2024, many museums hosted big shows devoted to the artist to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth. We Americans are late to the party, a tardiness partly attributable to the fact that there are just five Friedrich paintings held by museums in this country. It is therefore expensive, cumbersome, and difficult to assemble the finest Friedrichs in the US, and that may be why, when the Met has attempted similar shows in the past—this is the third Friedrich show at the museum in the past half-century—they were always much smaller.

Thank goodness the Met has finally mounted the large-scale show Friedrich has long deserved here. The museum has organized a well-rounded blockbuster, with dozens of drawings and prints to round out all the paintings on view. Herein lies this exhibition’s greatest revelation: Friedrich was just as consummate a draughtsman as he was a painter.

The first few galleries are devoted mainly to Friedrich’s early drawings, many crafted following his relocation to Dresden in 1798. In the years beforehand, Friedrich studied art, both at a local university in Greifswald, the Baltic city where he was born in 1774, and at an academy in Copenhagen. At both schools, he was taught to focus on the human figure, as was common for artists of his era. But when looking at these initial works on paper, it quickly becomes apparent that Friedrich had plans to diverge from convention.

Take a work like Rock Arch in the Uttewalder Grund (ca. 1803), which shows two minuscule people passing between a pair of gigantic boulders. The eye is drawn not to these people, one of whom throws up their arms in awe, but to the massive rocks on either side, which Friedrich has emphasized by piling up layers of watered-down brown ink. Already, Friedrich is pushing at the limits of figuration, painting out trees and people so thinly that they are barely there.

He went even further with Eastern Coast of Rügen with Shepherd (1805–06), in which a field hand and his canine companion are dwarfed by an off-white mass, as if to portray expansive fields shrouded in mist. When people appear in a landscape painting, artists before Friedrich would typically make them the paining’s stars. But Friedrich’s protagonists are rollicking hills and the meteorological conditions to which they are subject. What is most striking is the drawing’s expressivity: Friedrich is portraying Rügen, an island near his hometown, as it is felt, not so much as it appears.

Both drawings show a clear debt to Romanticism, a movement that emerged in Germany during the previous decade. Out went Enlightenment-era emphases on rationality and reason, those sticky things that limit one’s worldview. In came exultations of subjectivity and selfhood—the stuff of life that cannot be boiled down to facts and scientific data. Using Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s concept of Naturphilosophie, German Romantics looked to nature to know their inner selves.

These were times when landscape painting was still done indoors. Perhaps Friedrich chose drawing as his primary medium for so long because he could do it on mountains and by the shore. And perhaps that’s why his initial paintings, executed when he was in his early 30s, are treacly and rigid. Filled with crucifixes and decrepit Gothic structures, they’re the work of a painter determined to recreate sights seen while traversing mountains—Friedrich was an avid hiker—within the confines of his studio. But the transcendence never quite ports over to his paintings of this era. There’s a dishonesty to them, these religious symbols used as a cheap shorthand for a fervor more easily translated on the spot.

Friedrich was more successful when he pared down his landscapes to the very basics, diverging sharply from reality. That’s why Monk by the Sea (1808–10), a five-and-half-foot-wide painting that comes perilously close to abstraction, still feels like a bombshell. Making its US debut in the Met show, the painting features an ocean and sky that meld to a single blue-black cloud, a miasma of gloom. The work is most shocking for what it doesn’t represent: ships navigating the choppy waters. Scholars know they are there because of reflectography, a photographic technique that allows researchers to peer beneath the topmost layer of paint. But they are impossible to make out in Friedrich’s final product because he painted away these vessels, cloaking them in stone-colored wavelets.

What else goes unseen in a work like Monk by the Sea? A whole lot of political material, potentially. Many of Friedrich’s paintings are obliquely critical of France’s invasion of German-speaking territories, which would not be officially unified into a nation-state until 1871, more than three decades after Friedrich’s death. We know that Friedrich was vehemently opposed to French imperialism, but it’s not always clear to what extent his paintings bear out that agenda—or if they contain any agenda at all. That hasn’t stopped historians from suggesting that they contain secret patriotic sentiments, however.

The Met show follows that nationalist interpretation, with the curators offering oaks, trees that proliferate in Germany, as patriotic symbols in Friedrich’s paintings. With their branches weighted down by snow, his evergreens are infirm but not yet fallen—still here after the storm. If you follow the Met’s thinking, Friedrich meant these oaks as metaphors for his homeland, which he believed would survive French incursion. It’s a compelling way of reading the work, but it’s also hard to know if this is a necessary rereading or an anachronistic projection. How much Friedrich really dialogued with all these political happenings isn’t explained much within the show itself, whose texts are crystal clear until conflict and imperialism get invoked.

The curators’ skittishness is understandable, for any mention of Friedrich vis-à-vis war calls up the specter of Nazism. Hitler notoriously embraced this strain of Romanticism in his quest to uphold Germanic ideals as a form of white supremacy, and one need not extrapolate far to see Friedrich’s paintings with their rolling vistas as a predecessor to “blood and soil” nationalist ideology. The Met show is oddly squeamish about all this, confining any mentions of Nazism to the accompanying catalog, where scholar Cordula Grewe writes, “It is certainly time that Friedrich steps out of Hitler’s shadow.” Such a response would make more sense within Germany, which has had its fill of exhibitions about Friedrich through the lens of fascism, but American audiences need the added context, especially given the moment in which this exhibition opens.

Perhaps that means we require another Friedrich survey, one that can ground him more fully in politics, both that of his day and of our own. For now, however, the Met show is more than suitable, providing casual fans and scholars alike with fodder for future study. That’s especially the case because of the show’s focus on the less widely seen works of Friedrich’s late-career period, when he embedded his landscapes with visual information that is not always easy to see.

One of those late landscapes, Mountain Landscape in Bohemia (ca. 1830), seems at first glance not to feature a single human at all, just puffy clouds, dusky peaks, and endless blades of grass that appear to sway in the wind. Amid all that grass is a band of brown host to several moss-colored squiggles, which may be travelers, seen from afar.

These people, if they even are people, are barely visible to the naked eye—you have to stand inches away from the canvas to notice them. But such is the magic of Friedrich’s paintings, whose surfaces always contain more than is initially apparent.