If you were keeping a leaderboard of the best paintings to see in New York right now, places one, two, three, and probably four would all be at the Met for “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature.”
What more is there to say? The show is about as essential as an art show can get. Connected to last year’s 250th birthday for Friedrich (an occasion for big celebrations in Germany), “The Soul of Nature” contains not only his most famous painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), but other paintings-you-either-know-or-should-know, like the stunningly modern Monk by the Sea (1808–10), with its tiny holy figure on the beach beneath a vast stormy sky, and the dreamy The Stages of Life (1835), with its sunset colors and air of mysterious allegory.
Strung between these hits are a variety of landscapes, major and minor, in ink and oil paint, which give a sense of Friedrich’s vividly observed and otherworldly view of nature. Honestly, I find Friedrich a little difficult to pin down. Just when I think I have figured out how he thinks, what his formula is, I find myself thinking he is doing the opposite.
Caspar David Friedrich, The Stages of Life (ca. 1834) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
Actually, that sense of unresolved stress, of riptides of thought beneath the finished image, is important to the whole spirit. It’s what makes Caspar David Friedrich the archetypal painter of German Romanticism. So, to the extent that I have anything to add to the sentence “this is a great show,” I’m going to reflect a little on the meaning of the “Romantic spirit.”
The Age of Unreason
Friedrich was born in 1774, into the late, self-conscious stage of the Enlightenment. It was in 1784 that philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) published the pamphlet What Is Enlightenment?, a manifesto-like argument for “the freedom to make public use of one’s reason at every point.” Rational thought, the intellectual lights of Europe believed, could clear away superstition and usher in a new age.
Romantic thought began as a counterattack, in 1798, in a small, strange German magazine called Athenaeum, published by the Schlegel brothers, August Wilhelm and Friedrich. What the German Romantics took from the Enlightenment was a focus on the individual as its starting point. It reversed the polarity of everything else: Instead of reason, it venerated the imagination; instead of clarity, contradiction; instead of the powers of illumination, the allure of mysterious darkness. The first issue of Athenaeum declared that Romanticism’s “first law” was that “the will of the artist does not suffer any law above himself.”
Caspar David Friedrich, Cross in the Mountains (1805) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.
The same year those words were published, a young Caspar David Friedrich, who’d been making the rounds of art schools, moved to Dresden to begin his career. His first significant medium was not oil paint but ink, and the ghostly sepia landscapes in “The Soul of Nature” are astonishing. One of these, Cross in the Mountains (1805), features the image of a crucifix statue, planted alone in nature. Depicted from a distance in a wooded landscape, the cross is framed in shadow against the sky.
The composition became the basis for a much larger altar-like painting (not at the Met) that Friedrich debuted in 1808 in his Dresden studio, surrounded theatrically by black cloth and illuminated by low light. This drew him his first public success—a succès de scandale, in fact. The “Ramdohr Affair,” as it is called, saw Cross in the Mountains attacked in print by the elder art critic Basilius von Ramdohr (1757–1822).
“It is true presumption when landscape painting wants to slink into the church and creep up on the altars,” Ramdohr wrote, further blasting Friedrich’s composition as irrational and distorted. In essence, Ramdohr was diagnosing the young painter’s image, correctly, as showing the symptoms of the emergent Romantic temperament. Dresden, however, was a hotbed of Romantic feeling; fans rallied to Friedrich. What the critic hated—both that nature painting was suddenly a new vehicle of spiritual veneration and that nature was distorted to express emotions rather than literally rendered—was what they loved.
In defending himself from his critic, Friedrich explained Cross in the Mountains as a clearly decodable allegory: the sun as God, the evergreen trees as symbols of faith that never fades, the crucifix “raised high on a rock, solid and immutable, like our faith in Jesus Christ.” But clearly, the bracing thrill of the image—today and probably then—is its sense of desolation. The image is reversible like that, either full of the solid presence of God’s grace or the lonely drama of the individual’s angst, depending on how you look at it.
Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea (1808-1810) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.
A few years later, Friedrich had his next major hit with, among other works, the unforgettably spooky Monk by the Sea. He wrote that he was trying to use the storm-tossed oceanscape to symbolize a revelation of Death and the Beyond in nature. Yet that epiphany, he stressed, was also doomed “to eternally remain a mystery to the finite knowledge of mankind (even to me, what I want to portray, and how I want to portray it, is in a way a puzzle).”
Battle for Nature’s Soul
What caused the collapse of Enlightenment optimism in the German lands in the final years of the 18th century? It’s not hard to say. It was Napoleon.
The Age of Reason became the Age of Revolution. In France, belief in the power of the rational mind to dispel the cobwebs of the past became the assault on the Divine Right of Kings. Intellectuals living in the motley network of feuding statelets of what we today know as Germany at first looked with optimism to the French Revolution. But their princes looked on with profound disquiet.
The resulting political tensions led to conflict with revolutionary France, and after 1793, France occupied German territory west of the Rhine, inaugurating years of strife. It wasn’t until two chaotic decades later that Napoleon would finally be sent packing. (Friedrich himself had to flee his city during the Battle of Dresden.)
Georg Friedrich Kersting, Caspar David Friedrich in His Studio (1811) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.
Meanwhile, as the Revolution became the Terror, and then the Republic became an Empire under Napoleon, intellectual coordinates were scrambled. In that first Atheneaum that heralded the arrival of the tormented and ecstatic Romantic sensibility, alongside musings on the absolute sovereignty of the poetic imagination, Friedrich Schlegel wrote of the “French Revolution as the greatest and most remarkable phenomenon in the history of states, as an almost universal earthquake, as an immeasurable flood in the political world, or as the model of revolutions, as the revolution.” But he also branded it “the most horrible grotesque of the age, where all the most profound prejudices and their most powerful forebodings are mixed together in a terrible chaos and woven together as bizarrely as possible into a gigantic tragicomedy of humanity.”
In 1806, the Holy Roman Empire that had united the Germanic lands for a millennium burst asunder under Napoleon’s pressure. Napoleon’s defeat of the numerically superior forces of Prussia-Saxony at the Battle of Jena was so commanding that it would force German leaders to regroup and modernize their approach to warfare, economy, and government—one of the starting points for modern German unification. When the French general paraded through the town of Jena with his Grande Armée, a 33-year-old philosopher named G.W.F. Hegel saw him and wrote an awed letter in which he declared that Bonaparte was “world history on horseback” (the famous line is a paraphrase, but it gets the gist of his comments). Hegel’s new philosophy, birthed from this time period, pictured history not as static but as a dynamic, explosive process shaped by the violent clash of ideas.
I know that’s a lot of background, but I mention it for the following reason: The major art genres had been history painting and portraits of great men. Isn’t it striking that at exactly this moment of epic history and human drama that it was landscape painting, traditionally a more minor genre, that became so newly exalted in Friedrich’s work?
Perhaps Friedrich’s turn to nature suggests escapism, looking to raw and pristine nature as relief from the spectacle of grubby current affairs. Yet at the same time, what makes Friedrich’s landscapes feel so lastingly distinct is the particular sense of psychic drama that emanates back at you from them.
Caspar David Friedrich, Morning Mist in the Mountains (1808). Photo by Ben Davis.
Look at the vivid and unforgettable Morning Mist in the Mountains (1808), one of my favorites from this show. A craggy wooded peak is nearly obscured by fog. Somewhere up on the mountain, so small I can barely even find it, there’s another cross planted in the woods—a sign of possible redemption almost swallowed up by turbulent forces sweeping the land and the sheer scale of phenomena so much greater than itself.
Friedrich’s nature is not edenic; it’s eerie and haunted. It’s also full of wrecked churches (Ruins at Oyben, ca. 1812), shipwrecks (The North Sea in Moonlight, 1823–24), and ancient primitive monuments (Dolmen in Autumn, ca. 1820)—Romantic symbols of the fleetingness of human ambition. And it brims with theatrical weather and celestial events, conveying a particularly intense feeling for the present moment surging up full of urgent portent (what art historian Arnold Hauser calls the “occasionalism” of Romantic art, “the approach which dissolves reality into a series of unsubstantial, inherently undefinable occasions…”).
Caspar David Friedrich, Dolmen in Autumn (ca. 1820) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.
If you want to be clever about it, and you remember your college philosophy, you can say that Friedrich’s artistic formula is very Hegelian: a thesis (the drama of contemporary human history) meets an antithesis (the impulse to escape into nature), and the clashing energies are resolved into a new term that is a synthesis (Friedrich’s emotive, momentous nature).
The best proof that the surrounding historical drama was cyphered into the drama of Friedrich’s nature imagery is a simple biographical fact: When the period of the Napoleonic Wars ended, and Germany calmed down, he would fall out out of fashion. The public thought he was too gloomy, too strange for the more stable times. He died poor.
Lost and Found
In terms of this stormy push-pull of clashing energies, if I am honest, I find that sometimes Friedrich goes too far into simple pleasant nature views to truly capture me, particularly in later canvasses. Conversely, sometimes his imagination sticks out too much and the works become a little artificial and overheated, verging on silly (e.g. Cross in the Forest of ca. 1812).
You can take this as a measure of the difficulty of the terrain, that a true stable synthesis is never achieved, only a precarious momentary balance (in fact, that balancing act itself is a part of the Romantic drama).
Caspar David Friedrich, Cross in the Forest (ca. 1812) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.
I discovered the thrill of a bunch of Friedrich works I didn’t previously know in “The Soul of Nature”—but I also come away thinking that there is a reason that Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is specifically such a present-day icon. Against the background of his other work, this painting does seem uniquely poised. While it is probably the image that most comes into to mind when you think “German Romantic painting,” I think its resonance has to do with the formula it strikes to cover over the jagged edges of the Romantic sensibility.
Friedrich’s famous painting is the classic art-historical image of human thought opening itself to the awesome forces of nature, to the unknown. This is what has made it a cliché of philosophy book covers and thumbnails for spirituality podcasts.
Significantly, it’s from 1818, right in the cooling-off after the end of the turbulent Wars of Liberation. Unlike the embattled evidence of human faith in Cross in the Mountain or Morning Mist in the Mountains, Friedrich’s Wanderer appeals to us particularly as viewers because it offers a stabilizing human entry point.
Visitors look at Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
There are few Friedrich paintings in “The Soul of Nature” where the figure is so large, fewer where it is at the center of the composition, and no other painting where it is exactly at the center as it is here, framed equally by nature on all sides. The rays formed by the horizon seem to converge right at the wanderer’s heart.
Friedrich’s Wanderer stands at the summit of the mountain. He’s mastered the landscape. He’s staring down at its wild drama, instead of being swamped within it, as in Monk by the Sea.
Finally, while there are debates about who the Wanderer is or what he represents, the painting’s currency today clearly connects to the way that the figure feels so artfully posed. His green velvet costume and cane look dandyish; his bare head feels strange at that chilly altitude, striking an appealingly incongruous note.
What it adds up to is a suggestion of nature-as-stage set. On reflection, even the ragged fog and cloud seems to be, not sublime forces beyond human control, but rather cinematic smoke effects dramatizing the inner emotions of our main character.
Forged in a historical moment when the idea of a static world was yielding to a sense that change was the law, Friedrich was brilliant at capturing, through the spectacle of nature, a sense of disorientation and lost-ness that feels very modern. I think Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog connects in particular because it is a step beyond even that: It captures the yearning to consume disorientation and lost-ness, as a theme and as an image, so that one can feel modern.
“Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11, 2025
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