They connected his rapture for the German landscape with their slogan of “Blood & Soil,” which similarly romanticized national territory. The artist’s legacy suffered when Hitler and the Nazis claimed Friedrich as their ideological forebear in the 1930s. “We look to this human presence as a means of determining the general scale of the scene,” he writes, “and, more specifically, of relating our physical bodies to the spatial parameters of the painted world.” Here, the brushy sky, like those of J.M.W. As Julian Jason Haladyn explains in his 2016 essay “Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer’: Paradox of the Modern Subject,” the subject serves as a surrogate for the viewer. Back in his studio, he cobbled these together to create a new, imaginary landscape.īetween the viewer and the foggy distance, Friedrich painted a Rückenfigur, or a figure seen from behind. He sketched individual rocks and natural forms with intense detail. To construct the composition, Friedrich traveled to the Elbe Sandstone Mountains (now the territory of the Czech Republic) southeast of Dresden. The artist began creating the artwork, that’s now nearly synonymous with his name, around 1817-1818. Friedrich exemplified these qualities as he placed one man, gazing at a vast and unknowable territory, in the middle of his canvas. In particular, the period exalted individuals and their strong emotions. Nature-wild, unbridled, and far more powerful than 19th century Europeans-became a major subject. Throughout Europe, writers, artists, and musicians turned to emotion, imagination, and the sublime for inspiration. The aesthetic began as a reaction against the Enlightenment values (logic, rationality, order) that partially contributed to the bloody, monarch-toppling French Revolution of 1789. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is the quintessential Romantic artwork. It has been used to illustrate Franz Schubert’s Winter Journey cycle, a classical music composition that evokes a gloomy, itinerant protagonist. It adorned the cover of Terry Eagleton’s 1990 philosophical tome The Ideology of the Aesthetic.
Over the past two centuries, the image has become a cultural icon. “ The heart is the center of the universe,” he notes. Art historian Joseph Koerner, a professor at Harvard University, notes that the midpoint of the painting rests at the man’s chest. Mounted on a dark, craggy rock face, the figure stands at the center of distant, converging planes. It’s a tough feeling to describe, but the painting does it wonderfully.In Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog,” a man wearing a dark green overcoat and boots overlooks a cloudy landscape, steadying himself with a cane. He stands tall, in defiance of the challenge he just completed and he enjoys the magnificent view he has thus earned.
His wanderer has conquered the peak, and in the process has raised himself above the clouds. He’s achieved verticality.įriedrich perfectly encapsulates the feeling of climbing a mountain. It feels as if he’s escaped the chaos-filled world below and ascended to a higher plane of calmness and reflection. Looking out, he can see shorter peaks poking up through the swirling clouds and fog below. The wanderer surveys the surrounding landscape with an air of confidence, as if he’s just conquered it. He stands on a mountain peak with wind-whipped hair and a walking stick at his side. Friedrich puts us behind his subject, so we get to see what he sees.
It was painted around 1818 by Caspar David Friedrich, and it’s called Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. The painting shown above encapsulates all of this beautifully. It’s a triumph over gravity, and it gives the climber a great sense of accomplishment as well as a command over the surrounding landscape. Climbing to the top of a mountain is the closest a person can get to escaping the earth’s surface without taking flight.
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