Caspar David Friedrich and the Aesthetics of Community

Abstract

IN 1826, GOETHE DESCRIBED AN ACQUAINTANCE OF HIS AS SUFFERING FROM the universal illness of the current time, subjectivity. (1) He equated this disease with Romanticism, declaring the turn inward as a retrograde force in history and a threat to great art. A consideration of Friedrich Kersting's famous portrait of Caspar David Friedrich in his atelier (fig. 1) leads to precisely such an understanding of the Romantic subject. artist is represented alone in his Dresden studio, deeply absorbed in his work. room is conspicuously empty; only an easel, chair, a few palettes, and the artist himself occupy the space. lack of props or sketches from which Friedrich works strongly evokes his often-cited aphorism, The artist should not merely paint what he sees before him but also what he sees within him. (2) This inward-oriented approach to painting has implications for the viewer's experience as well. artist's canvas is turned away from the viewer, so that each individual is left to imagine the content of Friedrich's painting. This work leaves us with an image of the Romantic artist as an isolated genius and viewership is represented as an equally withdrawn and solitary activity. idea that subjective feeling is central to both the production and reception of Friedrich's art has led to the repeated use of the term Sinnoffenheit (open-ended meaning) to characterize his landscapes. This emphasis on subjectivity naturally resists any form of shared experience between viewer and artist, or among viewers themselves. Accordingly, Friedrich's work is often contrasted with the collective aspirations of Philipp Otto Runge and the Nazarenes. In practice, however, Romantic subjectivity cannot be reduced to an unequivocal retreat from others and the As Hilmar Frank notes, art in the Romantic period begins to function as a problematization of being, as an investigation into and expression of [the subject's] forever evolving relation to the world. (3) Implicit in the exploration of Dasein (being), though, is necessarily also the question of Mitsein (being-with). To use Jean-Luc Nancy's words, Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence. (4) This ontological truth has become fashion (3). able in recent years, prompting revisionary scholarship on much of the German Idealist tradition. Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, for instance, have all been the subject of recent publications on community or intersubjectivity. (5) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Prompted by the recent discourse surrounding intersubjectivity, I will question whether there is any evocation of community in the work of Caspar David Friedrich, an artist whose conscious self-fashioning as a recluse strongly suggests otherwise. (6) Has the apparent subjectivity or inwardness of Romantic art caused the question of intersubjectivity to go unduly neglected in Friedrich's landscapes? To answer this question I will begin by reconsidering the foundation of Romantic artist communities and their possible relationship to the Kantian sensus communis. In Kant's thought, aesthetic judgment is a sense common to everyone. Thus, it has the potential to build a moral community based on a mutual experience of the free play of imagination and understanding, or an ineffable reciprocity of feeling, to use Terry Eagleton's words. (7) Within this conceptual framework of community, I will examine the open structure of Friedrich's landscapes, focusing specifically on the extension of Kant's aesthetics to theories of landscape depiction in the late eighteenth century. As we shall see, in Friedrich's system, the work of art functions to unite subjects spiritually through profoundly personal aesthetic experiences in a true community of feeling. Romantic Communities of Feeling and the Aesthetic Friedrich is famous for capturing a melancholic solitude through images of lone wanderers at rest in sublime landscapes. …