The Awe-Struck Witness

"Whenever a storm with thunder and lightning moved over the sea, he would hurry out to the top of the cliffs as if he had a pact of friendship with the forces of nature, or even went on into the oakwood where the lightning had split a tall tree from top to bottom, which led him to murmur: 'How great, how mighty, how wonderful!' " Thus a friend remembered the wanderings of

Caspar David Friedrich as a young painter on the Baltic island of Rugen in 1802. It was Friedrich's favorite posture: Homo romanticus out in the weather, saluting the crag.

A soapmaker's son who was born in the seaport of Greifswald in 1774 and died obscure and slightly mad in Dresden in 1840, Friedrich was one of the most German artists Germany produced in the 19th century. He never made the obligatory journey south to study in Rome; his subject matter was the foggy and precipitous vista, sublimely expansive and filled with premonitory brooding. The writer Ludwig Tieck believed Friedrich was the Nordic genius incarnate, whose mission was "to express and suggest most sensitively the solemn sadness and religious stimulus which seem recently to be reviving our German world in a strange way." This month a retrospective of Friedrich's work --about 230 paintings and studies --opened in Frankfurt, reviving a man without whose work the romantic impulse in art cannot be fully understood.

Fog and Green Velvet. To compare Friedrich as a romantic to his great English contemporaries Turner and Constable is absurd. It also distorts the actual nature of his achievement. English romanticism always had an intensely realistic strain; its ecstasies of involvement with nature came from a meticulous observation of growth and form. This rarely happens with Friedrich, whose work (see color opposite) often had the peculiarly stiff and abstract character of a landscape assembled from prototypes. There is, for example, no way of reading Traveler Looking over the Sea of Fog (circa 1818) as a real scene; with his wind-blown hair and green velvet suit, Friedrich's Byronic wanderer is as incongruous on his craggy perch as a Magritte businessman. He is, instead, that convention of a Friedrich landscape, the awe-struck witness.

Friedrich's work, the Dresden painter Ludwig Richter remarked in 1825, does not deal with "the spirit and importance of nature ... Friedrich chains us to an abstract idea, using the forms of nature in a purely allegorical manner, as signs and hieroglyphs." Like other German Fruhromantiker (early romanticists) of his time, Friedrich had a penchant for introversion and metaphysical generalizations which the more pragmatic English romantics (except men like Blake and Coleridge) did not share. He filled his work with symbolism, most of which is lost to a modern viewer.

It is possible to overrate the density of Friedrich's allegories. There is, for example, a German critic's claim that the rock against which the little traveler in Landscape with Rainbow (circa 1809) is leaning is really "the symbol of faith" and that his hat on the ground is "a sign of humility." But often the symbolism is plain enough, as in a well-known picture usually called The Wreck of the "Hope" (circa 1822). Friedrich was inspired, at first, by reports of early expeditions to the North Pole, all of which failed. But the image he produced, with its grinding slabs of travertine-colored floe ice chewing up a wooden ship, goes beyond documentary into allegory: the frail bark of human aspiration crushed by the world's immense and glacial indifference. "The ice in the north must look very different from that," Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia is said to have grumped on viewing this picture. He was right, though it scarcely matters. Friedrich's shipwreck survives as one of the most remarkable images of "sublimity" in all 19th century painting.

Ethical Teacher. In treating landscape as a paradigm of human fate and mood, Friedrich became one of the few major painters in the German romantic movement. The issue then, as posed by the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, was straightforward: "Do not animals, stones, plants, stars and breezes also belong with mankind, which is merely a central meeting point of countless varied threads? Can mankind be understood divorced from nature, and is it so very different from other manifestations of nature?" This, the key question of the romantic sensibility then as of ecology now, was Friedrich's obsession. He pursued it through a full gamut of subject --from beetling ice crags and the white chalk abysses of Rugen Island down to the plains, flooded in a benediction of yellow light, which were his equivalent for Paradise. "On the day he is painting air," Friedrich's wife said to a friend, "he may not be spoken to!"

To Friedrich, nature was an ethical teacher, a repository of religious experience. And when he found his pictures widely ignored (he was not a success in the marketplace), he succumbed to an almost paranoid embitterment, watching "realist" landscape triumph over his ideal form of it in the 1830s. For the naturalists, Friedrich had one last word. "If [the artist] sees nothing within him," he wrote, "then he should also refrain from painting what he sees before him. Otherwise his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which"--startling phrase--"one expects to find only the sick or the dead."

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