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German Romantic Painting From Berlin - Critical Essay
Contemporary Review, May, 2001 by Donald Bruce
TWO years have passed since the imaginative and scholarly exhibitions of the portraits of Ingres and the self-portraits of Rembrandt were mounted in the Sainshury Wing of the National Gallery. One has waited in vain for a comparable exhibition there, only to be disappointed by a scattering of shallow displays, rich in contrivance and sparse in substance. Their vagueness of thought and purpose has been excused by casual titles, with frequent craven use of present participles: Seeing Salvation, Painting Quickly in France and, all over the gallery, Telling Time; not to speak of the butterfly-minded Shadows. The latest, patchiest and least enterprising of these is a job-lot from the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which is being rebuilt.
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There is some precious metal here, and much dross. Most of what has arrived in London, which includes five airless interiors and a picture of a curtain, all by Adolph Menzel, is ponderous Hohenzollern dross. Let us make the most of the exhibition, and look at the gold: Friedrich, Richter and the under-represented Nazarene School.
Caspar David Friedrich rightly asserted that to an artist the imagination, or inner vision, is all-important: 'An artist should portray not only what is before his eyes but what he sees in himself'. In that sense, one would add, all portraits are in part portraits of the artist, and all landscapes revelations of his inner world. Friedrich painted with the shutters closed over his studio windows, so that he could work by plumbing his own creative memory. Before starting a painting he stood gazing at the canvas in the half-light until he envisaged what should be on it. What emerged from his mind into the open was intended to create the opposite effect: in his own words, to 'react on others from the outside inwards'.
He added that if the artist could see nothing inside, he should refrain from painting what he saw outside. What Friedrich himself saw outside was shaped both by his melancholy disposition, and by his familiarity in his youth with the harbour-town of Greifswald on the Baltic Sea: across the sound, sombre in winter, of Rugen Island. His inner vision was of lank sailing ships befogged in snow-swept seas; creeping sea-mists surmounted by sails and rocks, represented in this exhibition by his Greifswald Harbour and Moonrise over the Sea; ruined abbeys and shores patrolled by spectral monks; solitary trees listing in a harsh terrain, as in The Single Tree; a countryside heroically gaunt, as epic and cheerless as a polar sunset. Brooding and refining on his sketches, Friedrich often conflated views of disparate regions in one landscape. He travelled from Germany only to Denmark and Bohemia. His picture of the Arctic and the Alps are imaginative extensions of what he had seen on the frozen Baltic and the mountains o f Upper Saxony.
Tier after grim tier of peaks aspires to a dreamlike immensity in his Riesengebirge Mountains, with a sole fell-walker resting on a rock. In The Solitary Tree a shepherd shelters from the rain under an isolated oak, itself weather-beaten, on a swamp in the Harz Mountains, desolate except for drenched sheep. Beyond a hedge and another soaked pasture a steeple-top ascends from an obviously deep valley; and beyond that the crest of the Brocken plunges into the tears of a mournful dawn. Moonrise over the Sea, painted as a nocturnal companion-piece, records a man and two women as they watch the moon emerge from low clouds alongside three broad-sailed boats. The tarnished-silver glow tips the women's cheeks and necks with a faint lustre. Friedrich preferred moonshine to the less cryptic light of day, and the ever-changing skies of the North to the monotonous blaze of the South. Especially, wrote his pupil Carus, he loved twilight. He shunned the very thought of visiting Italy.
No doubt the figure in bonnet and cloak is Friedrich himself. Such old German dress was disliked by the Prussian authorities, since it suggested resistance to the Prussianisation of a previously diverse and regional Germany. In another nightpiece by Friedrich, Contemplation of the Moon, the same man is accompanied by a woman who rests her forearm on his shoulder as they both stand in reverie before the moon and the evening star. They commune with each other and with nature by a half-uprooted but still vigorous oak. Friedrich was always spellbound by the knotty intricacy of oaks, and the droop of pines in a mysterious sublunary penumbra.
His wife Caroline, who probably appears in both moonscapes, is the subject of A Woman at a Window. Seen from the back, her ears pink in the light that also pierces her top-comb, Caroline opens the shutters of her husband's studio in Dresden to watch the sailing boats on the Elbe. The entering daylight streaks her high-waisted silk gown, as if invaded by sunset, with trails of variegated colours.
'Romantic' is now a word so blurred as to have lost a precise meaning. In nineteenth-century Germany there was a distinct Romantic Movement, defined by its advocates, the brothers Schlegel mainly as a revival of the age of the chivalrous romances, as in the tales of Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, and consequently a reversion to the aspirations and religious sentiments of the late Middle Ages. Heinrich Heine sardonically discussed their views in his essay on the German Romantic School. Friedrich von Schlegel, the champion of the Nazarene painters, by chance wrote what could be regarded as their manifesto in his description, published in 1802, of late Gothic painting in Italy and the Netherlands: 'strait forms, contained in sharp and clearly bounded contours, without chiaroscuro or grubby murk and shadow'. The Nazarenes (a title not of their own choosing, but given them by boorish jeering critics) sought in their quasi-monastic comradeship, and in the artistic practices of the fifteenth century, a way of ignori ng both the ravages of Napoleon's European wars and the incipience of Prussian militarism. Their future patrons were to come from the kingdom of Bavaria.
