Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation.
It was not until the late 1970s that Friedrich regained his reputation as an icon of the German Romantic movement and a painter of international importance. ==Life== ===Early years and family=== Caspar David Friedrich was born on 5 September 1774, in Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania, on the Baltic coast of Germany.
His mother, Sophie, died in 1781 when he was seven.
Arguably the greatest tragedy of his childhood happened in 1787 when his brother Johann Christoffer died: at the age of thirteen, Caspar David witnessed his younger brother fall through the ice of a frozen lake, and drown.
Some accounts suggest that Johann Christoffer perished while trying to rescue Caspar David, who was also in danger on the ice. Friedrich began his formal study of art in 1790 as a private student of artist Johann Gottfried Quistorp at the University of Greifswald in his home city, at which the art department is now named Caspar-David-Friedrich-Institut in his honour.
A year later, his sister Elisabeth died, and a second sister, Maria, succumbed to typhus in 1791.
He studied in Copenhagen until 1798, before settling in Dresden.
Mood was paramount, and influence was drawn from such sources as the Icelandic legend of Edda, the poems of Ossian and Norse mythology. ===Move to Dresden=== Friedrich settled permanently in Dresden in 1798.
Art historians and some of his contemporaries attribute such interpretations to the losses suffered during his youth to the bleak outlook of his adulthood, while Friedrich's pale and withdrawn appearance helped reinforce the popular notion of the "taciturn man from the North". Friedrich suffered depressive episodes in 1799, 1803–1805, c.1813, in 1816 and between 1824 and 1826.
Landscapes were his preferred subject, inspired by frequent trips, beginning in 1801, to the Baltic coast, Bohemia, the Krkonoše and the Harz Mountains.
Art historians and some of his contemporaries attribute such interpretations to the losses suffered during his youth to the bleak outlook of his adulthood, while Friedrich's pale and withdrawn appearance helped reinforce the popular notion of the "taciturn man from the North". Friedrich suffered depressive episodes in 1799, 1803–1805, c.1813, in 1816 and between 1824 and 1826.
By 1804 he had produced 18 etchings and four woodcuts; they were apparently made in small numbers and only distributed to friends.
These effects took their strength from the depiction of light, and of the illumination of sun and moon on clouds and water: optical phenomena peculiar to the Baltic coast that had never before been painted with such an emphasis. His reputation as an artist was established when he won a prize in 1805 at the Weimar competition organised by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
is also worthy of praise." Friedrich completed the first of his major paintings in 1808, at the age of 34.
Friedrich responded with a programme describing his intentions in 1809, comparing the rays of the evening sun to the light of the Holy Father.
Rosenblum specifically describes Friedrich's 1809 painting The Monk by the Sea, Turner's The Evening Star and Rothko's 1954 Light, Earth and Blue as revealing affinities of vision and feeling.
This statement marked the only time Friedrich recorded a detailed interpretation of his own work, and the painting was among the few commissions the artist ever received. Following the purchase of two of his paintings by the Prussian Crown Prince, Friedrich was elected a member of the Berlin Academy in 1810.
Yet in 1816, he sought to distance himself from Prussian authority and applied that June for Saxon citizenship.
Art historians and some of his contemporaries attribute such interpretations to the losses suffered during his youth to the bleak outlook of his adulthood, while Friedrich's pale and withdrawn appearance helped reinforce the popular notion of the "taciturn man from the North". Friedrich suffered depressive episodes in 1799, 1803–1805, c.1813, in 1816 and between 1824 and 1826.
Nevertheless, with the aid of his Dresden-based friend Graf Vitzthum von Eckstädt, Friedrich attained citizenship, and in 1818, membership in the Saxon Academy with a yearly dividend of 150 thalers.
He is no longer the upright, supportive figure that appeared in Two Men Contemplating the Moon in 1819.
The couple had three children, with their first, Emma, arriving in 1820.
In 1820, the Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich, at the behest of his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, visited Friedrich's studio and returned to Saint Petersburg with a number of his paintings, an exchange that began a patronage that continued for many years.
By 1820, he was living as a recluse and was described by friends as the "most solitary of the solitary".
Not long thereafter, the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, tutor to Alexander II, met Friedrich in 1821 and found in him a kindred spirit.
Art historians and some of his contemporaries attribute such interpretations to the losses suffered during his youth to the bleak outlook of his adulthood, while Friedrich's pale and withdrawn appearance helped reinforce the popular notion of the "taciturn man from the North". Friedrich suffered depressive episodes in 1799, 1803–1805, c.1813, in 1816 and between 1824 and 1826.
Art historians and some of his contemporaries attribute such interpretations to the losses suffered during his youth to the bleak outlook of his adulthood, while Friedrich's pale and withdrawn appearance helped reinforce the popular notion of the "taciturn man from the North". Friedrich suffered depressive episodes in 1799, 1803–1805, c.1813, in 1816 and between 1824 and 1826.
From 1826 these motifs became a permanent feature of his output, while his use of color became more dark and muted.
He became isolated and spent long periods of the day and night walking alone through woods and fields, often beginning his strolls before sunrise. In June 1835, Friedrich suffered his first stroke, which left him with minor limb paralysis and greatly reduced his ability to paint.
he moves with a stoop". By 1838, he was capable only of working in a small format.
By 1838, his work no longer sold or received attention from critics; the Romantic movement had been moving away from the early idealism that the artist had helped found. After his death, Carl Gustav Carus wrote a series of articles which paid tribute to Friedrich's transformation of the conventions of landscape painting.
Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation.
He and his family were living in poverty and grew increasingly dependent for support on the charity of friends. Friedrich died in Dresden on 7 May 1840, and was buried in Dresden's Trinitatis-Friedhof (Trinity Cemetery) east of the city centre (the entrance to which he had painted some 15 years earlier).
The Norwegian Symbolist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) would have seen Friedrich's work during a visit to Berlin in the 1880s.
Yet, by 1890, the symbolism in his work began to ring true with the artistic mood of the day, especially in central Europe.
Munch's 1899 print The Lonely Ones echoes Friedrich's Rückenfigur (back figure), although in Munch's work the focus has shifted away from the broad landscape and toward the sense of dislocation between the two melancholy figures in the foreground. Friedrich's modern revival gained momentum in 1906, when thirty-two of his works were featured in an exhibition in Berlin of Romantic-era art.
The early 20th century brought a renewed appreciation of his work, beginning in 1906 with an exhibition of thirty-two of his paintings in Berlin.
Munch's 1899 print The Lonely Ones echoes Friedrich's Rückenfigur (back figure), although in Munch's work the focus has shifted away from the broad landscape and toward the sense of dislocation between the two melancholy figures in the foreground. Friedrich's modern revival gained momentum in 1906, when thirty-two of his works were featured in an exhibition in Berlin of Romantic-era art.
By the 1920s his paintings had been discovered by the Expressionists, and in the 1930s and early 1940s Surrealists and Existentialists frequently drew ideas from his work.
By the 1920s his paintings had been discovered by the Expressionists, and in the 1930s and early 1940s Surrealists and Existentialists frequently drew ideas from his work.
The rise of Nazism in the early 1930s again saw a resurgence in Friedrich's popularity, but this was followed by a sharp decline as his paintings were, by association with the Nazi movement, interpreted as having a nationalistic aspect.
However, despite a renewed interest and an acknowledgment of his originality, his lack of regard for "painterly effect" and thinly rendered surfaces jarred with the theories of the time. During the 1930s, Friedrich's work was used in the promotion of Nazi ideology, which attempted to fit the Romantic artist within the nationalistic Blut und Boden.
Clark's dismissal of Friedrich reflected the damage the artist's reputation sustained during the late 1930s. Friedrich's reputation suffered further damage when his imagery was adopted by a number of Hollywood directors, such as Walt Disney, built on the work of such German cinema masters as Fritz Lang and F.
In 1934, the Belgian painter René Magritte (1898–1967) paid tribute in his work The Human Condition, which directly echoes motifs from Friedrich's art in its questioning of perception and the role of the viewer.
A few years later, the Surrealist journal Minotaure featured Friedrich in a 1939 article by critic Marie Landsberger, thereby exposing his work to a far wider circle of artists.
By the 1920s his paintings had been discovered by the Expressionists, and in the 1930s and early 1940s Surrealists and Existentialists frequently drew ideas from his work.
The influence of The Wreck of Hope (or The Sea of Ice) is evident in the 1940–41 painting Totes Meer by Paul Nash (1889–1946), a fervent admirer of Ernst.
Some of these works were lost in the fire that destroyed Munich's Glass Palace (1931) and later in the 1945 bombing of Dresden. ===Later life and death=== Friedrich's reputation steadily declined over the final fifteen years of his life.
In 1949, art historian Kenneth Clark wrote that Friedrich "worked in the frigid technique of his time, which could hardly inspire a school of modern painting", and suggested that the artist was trying to express in painting what is best left to poetry.
Rosenblum specifically describes Friedrich's 1809 painting The Monk by the Sea, Turner's The Evening Star and Rothko's 1954 Light, Earth and Blue as revealing affinities of vision and feeling.
Friedrich's Romantic paintings have also been singled out by writer Samuel Beckett (1906–89), who, standing before Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, said "This was the source of Waiting for Godot, you know." In his 1961 article "The Abstract Sublime", originally published in ARTnews, the art historian Robert Rosenblum drew comparisons between the Romantic landscape paintings of both Friedrich and Turner with the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko.
It was not until the late 1970s that Friedrich regained his reputation as an icon of the German Romantic movement and a painter of international importance. ==Life== ===Early years and family=== Caspar David Friedrich was born on 5 September 1774, in Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania, on the Baltic coast of Germany.
By the 1970s, he was again being exhibited in major galleries across the world, as he found favour with a new generation of critics and art historians. Today, his international reputation is well established.
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