Caspar David Friedrich at the Met

Apr 7

We went to see the Caspar David Friedrich show, The Soul of Nature, at the Met the other day. I’d always regarded Friedrich’s epic landscapes as examples of the apocalyptic sublime; but seeing them in person had the strange effect of reducing the scale of his vision. Viewing these giant landscapes isolated on the internet one has the impression that the canvases are very large. Not so in real life; I had to lean into the paintings in order to see them and kept setting off the alarm. This reduction in scale is compounded by Friedrich’s rather disconcerting habit of placing the Christian cross in the middle of forlorn wilderness landscapes—like American astronauts planting a US flag on the moon; or as if an alien Christian spacecraft had crash landed in a forest... This is a prime example of exactly what Lucretius warns against in De Rerum Natura: projecting a teleology onto nature obscures perception and stifles curiosity. So the landscapes can tend to border hard upon on kitsch, like a proto Thomas Kinkaid; apocalyptic indeed…