Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The paintings of Caspar David Friedrich hover between the sublime and the syrupy, occasionally touching down on either side of that surprisingly narrow divide. There are the ravishingly misted, blue-lit swaths of wilderness, vibrating with the stirrings of a searching spirit. Ralph Waldo Emerson might have been describing them when he wrote: “The world is emblematic . . . the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” And then there are cloying dawns and villainous clouds, glades and peaks so operatic that they infused the classic Disney aesthetic. In the nearly two centuries since his death, Friedrich’s style has become so universal and familiar that it’s hard to see on its own terms. The literary overtones of the northern landscape, the political meanings of medieval architecture, the tension between realism and religion or between democratic urges and political stability, the ruefulness of an urbanising Europe — all these specific historical elements have amalgamated into a timeless romanticism. But the artist who emerges from the Metropolitan Museum’s Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature is a more nuanced and complex figure than his few famous pictures suggest. His early sketches and ink-wash drawings reveal a virtuoso of close observation. He reproduced the intricacies of plant life with the passionate precision of a botanist and turned an architect’s eye on the moodiness of ruined abbeys. But he also infused those details with transformative power. The hollow of a tree takes on the shape of an owl. A branch becomes an arm. Tiny cross-hatchings cohere into a boulder that vibrates with divine purpose. Friedrich issued his own dictum: “A painter should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within himself.” It’s a bit of a shock to realise that the Met show is the first comprehensive Friedrich exhibition in the US. I’ve only ever seen most of the works here in reproduction, so I’m grateful to curators Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein for pulling together so many of them, from such a range of sources. In scene after scene, Friedrich invites us into his world, inserting the viewer as a tiny avatar, always shown from behind. We are the pair of friends gazing upon a golden moonrise from beneath a scraggy oak. We are the woman stretching her arms to the rising (or setting) sun, bathing in its life-affirming brilliance. We are the hiker atop a lonely peak. The man in “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” (c1817) sports a green velvet suit and bleached white collar, as if he had strolled out of the city and up into the wilds on a whim. He can’t get a clear view of where he’s come from or where he’s going, since the world at his feet is beset by clouds of uncertainty, but there’s something privileged about his perch and consoling in that panorama. In the cultural language of the early 19th century, wandering had both spiritual and political resonance. It was a way to link personal development, Bildung, with national landscape — to become more fully human (and more authentically German) by seeking a bond with nature. Friedrich’s “Wanderer” is often associated with Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (1827), in which a melancholy loner stumbling through the snow torments himself with memories of a love-filled spring.The ultimate fusion of human yearning and nature’s mystery occurs in “Monk by the Sea” (1808-10). A robed figure stands between desolate shore and brooding storm. The low horizon throws up an expanse of darkest blue, which rises from black waters towards looming clouds. Friedrich’s subject is the ceaseless struggle against the unfathomable.The poet Heinrich von Kleist was stunned when he saw the painting at the Berlin Academy in 1810. “Nothing can be sadder and more discomforting than this position in the world: the only spark of life in the vast realm of death, the lonely centre of a lonely circle. The picture . . . lies there like an apocalypse . . . and since, in its uniformity and boundlessness, it has nothing but the frame in the foreground, when a person beholds it, it is as if his eyelids have been cut off.” Kleist shot himself within a year of writing those words. In its resounding abstraction, “Monk by the Sea” looks ahead to Turner, who tucked the sublime between layers of colour, and, more presciently still, to Mark Rothko’s glowing rectangles. But Friedrich was often explicit in his use of Christian iconography. In an 1812 version of “Cross in the Mountains”, a Gothic church and towering spruces needle up towards a rose-coloured sky. The whole scene is replete with religious symbols. In the middle distance, a crucifix rises above a stream (of life) that flows past slick rocks (signifying spiritual struggle) and broken branches (suffering and sin, a crown of thorns) into a pinkish pool (the blood of Christ). German romantics found in the organic forms of gothic architecture an analogue for their native forests. Here, the structure and its rose surroundings suggest a poetic interjection into the prose of daily life. At the same time, Friedrich’s eye for detail is so meticulous and his brush so deft, that you can choose to read this forest of coded emblems as, well, an actual forest. Even the cross is a stroke of realism, the sort of wooden marker that might greet a hiker at the juncture of two paths. That motif recurs regularly, as a signpost with multiple meanings. “To those who seek it, [it is] a consolation,” Friedrich wrote, “to those who don’t, it’s just a cross.” That ambiguity isn’t enough, though, to rescue this “Cross in the Mountains” from kitsch, composed with relentless symmetry, and suffused by a holy radiance that might have been squeezed from a tube. In his best works, Friedrich treated nature as a projection of existential anxieties; in the weakest, he commandeered it as a pretty backdrop for ritual uplift.My favourite Friedrich is the most uncharacteristic. “Woman at the Window” (1822), a rare interior, quivers, not with grand struggles of the soul, but with more intimate affections. We see the subject, as always, from behind, yet she’s no generic human prop, positioned there for scale. She’s the artist’s wife Caroline, standing on the wide floorboards of their bare house in Dresden and looking out over the River Elbe. The pale light of an early spring flows in through the window, dressing her in the colours of water, woods, sunshine and moss. She has no need to wander or climb, or even to leave the city. Nature comes to her.To May 11, metmuseum.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
