Mr. Semitic – or drink?

Caspar David Friedrich panels hover between Semitism and drink, and sometimes fall on both sides of this narrow gap. There are mysterious areas of the wild with an angry blue knowledge, vibrating while moving the search spirit. Perhaps Ralph Waldou Emerson described them when he wrote: “The world is a symbol. The whole nature is a metaphor for the human mind.” Then, there is dawn, evil clouds, and so much that they have frozen classic Disney.

In nearly two centuries of his death, Friedrich’s style has become so familiar and familiar that it is difficult to see his own terms. Literary tones of the northern landscapes, the political meanings of architecture in the Middle Ages, the tension between realism and religion or between democratic induction and political stability, and the integration of urban Europe – all these specific historical elements have merged into immortal romance.

But the artist who comes out of the Metropolitan Museum Casbar David Friedrich: The Spirit of Nature He is a more accurate and complex character than his few famous pictures. His early drawings and ink washing drawings reveal close monitoring. The complications of vegetarian life are reproduced with an emotional accuracy of the plant world and I feel the display of an architect on the devastating Apis mood.

But he instilled these details with the transformative power. The hollow of the tree takes in the form of an owl. The branch becomes an arm. Small cross bubbles are compatible with a rock shaking with the divine purpose. Friedrich issued his saying: “The painter must only draw what he sees in front of him, but also what he sees within himself.”

It is a bit shock to realize that MET’s offer is the first Frederich comprehensive exhibition in the United States. I saw only most of the works here in the field of reproduction, so I am grateful to the organizers Alison Hokkanson and Joanna Sidinstein to collect many of them, from a group of sources.

In the scene after the scene, Friedrich invites us to his world, and the scenes are inserted as a small Avatar, which always appears from the back. We are a pair of friends staring at the spread of the golden moon from the bottom of oak wood. We are the woman who supplies her arms to sunlight (or precedent), showering her for sure on her life. We are the park at the top of a single peak.

The man in “Wander over the sea of ​​fog” (C1817) demands a green velvet suit and a white collar whitening, as if he was wandering from the city and even in the wilderness on a whim. He cannot get a clear vision of the place from which he comes or where he is going, because the world at his feet suffers from clouds from uncertainty, but there is something special about his bumper and sympathy in that panorama.

In the cultural language in the early nineteenth century, roaming had a spiritual and political resonance. It was a way to link personal development, BildongWith the national landscape – to become more humane (and more authentic German) by searching for a bond with nature. “Wander” of Frederick is often associated with the Subert Song Winterreise (1827), where the only grief stumbles through the snow, torturing itself with the memories of a spring full of love.

The final fusion of human longing and nature’s ambiguity occurs in “Monk by the Sea” (1808-10). He stands upside down between the closed beach and the brood storm. The low horizon throws an area of ​​blue blue, which rises from black water towards the clouds that wave on the horizon. Friedrich’s topic is the struggle that does not stop against what it does not contribute.

The poet Heinrich von Clerest was shocked when he saw the painting at the Berlin Academy in 1810. A single circle. Photo. . . It lies like the end of the world. . . And since, in monotheism and energy, he only has the frame in the foreground, when a person sees it, it seems as if his eyelids have been cut.“ Chloe called himself within a year of writing these words.

In his thunderous stripping, “Monk by the Sea” looks forward to Turner, who was tucked between the layers of color, and more cloud, for the place of incandescent Rothko rectangles. But Friedrich was often frankly using Christian icons. In the version of 1812 of “Cross in the Mountains”, the Gothic Church and the tall needle are heading towards a rose sky. The entire scene is full of religious symbols. In the medium distance, the cross rises above a stream (from life) that flows through slow rocks (indicating the spiritual struggle) and broken branches (suffering and sin, a crown of thorns) to a pink pool (blood of Christ).

German romantic found in the organic forms of Gothic architecture, which is an symmetry of their original forests. Here, the structure and the pink ocean indicate a poetic interference in the prose of daily life. At the same time, Fredchic’s eye is very accurate and very skilled, so that you can choose to read this forest of encrypted slogans, as well as a actual forest. Even the cross is a realistic blow, which is a type of wooden signs that may receive the roaming at the turn of two tracks. This incentive is repeated regularly, as a sign with multiple meanings. “For those who are looking for it, (it’s) is a consolation,” Friedrich wrote, “for those who do not do it, it is just a cross.”

This ambiguity is not enough, though, to save this “cross in the mountains” from Kitsch, consists of an unimaginable symmetry, and mixed with sacred radiance that may have been compressed from a tube. At his best, Friedrich dealt with nature as a projection of existential anxiety; In the weakest, it seized it as a beautiful background for ritual height.

My favorite Friedrich is the most famous. “A woman in the window” (1822), which is the rare interior, and files, not with the major spirit conflicts, but with more intimate emotions. We see the topic, as always, from the back, however, it is not a general human pillar, placed there for the scale. She is the wife of the artist Caroline, stands on the wide floor plates of her naked house in Dresden and looks at the El Imp. The pale light flows in the early spring through the window, wearing it with water, forests, sunlight, and moss. She has no need to wander or ascend, or even leave the city. Nature comes to it.

To May 11, Metmuseum.org

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