Friedrichian Images in Expressionist Art

Abstract

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), the great German Romantic painter and contemporary of Blake and Turner, has rightly been termed Europe's first truly modem artist. Having argued in an earlier essay! that men like Friedrich and the poet Friedrich Holderlin are (with Heinrich von Kleist, Bonaventura, Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert and others) the real fathers of modernism in Germany, I now want to explore the meanings of some of Friedrich's most fascinating and influential images and the echoes of those images in Symbolist and Expressionist art, for it is a matter of fact that many painters of the Symbolist-Expressionist era attested their sense of kinship with the great Romantic painter by taking from his work a motif to which they gave a new content or which they developed in a new formal language. The most revolutionary and uncompromising of all Friedrich's works and one of the two to which subsequent painters have felt most need to respond is Monk by the Sea (1809/10: ILK 168).2 It depicts a landscape of overwhelming bleakness: we see a solitary monk-like figure holding his head in his hands (a traditional gesture of mourning; the painting's companion piece reveals it to be his own death that he is contemplating). He is standing on a narrow strip of sand, clearly more symbolical than real, facing a doom-dark, immeasurable sea, beneath a livid, brooding sky. Although its connotations are eschatological, the scene also takes one back to the darkness upon the face of the deep at the Creation. As an artistic creation, it has been arrived at by a process of ruthless reduction from less audacious earlier versions, which has