← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Caspar David Friedrich at the Met
00:28:09
Curators Alison Hokanson and Joanna Seidenstein discuss the exhibit, Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, on view at the Met hrough May 11.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I'm grateful you're here. Two words for you today. Kendrick Lamar so good. On today's show, we'll come up with some budget ways to celebrate Valentine's Day. And we'll talk about ways to share your day with other special people in your life. Yes, we'll discuss Palentine's Day and we'll talk about the new Disney docu series, Harlem Ice. It follows a nonprofit that teaches girls figure skating and life skills. That is the plan. So let's get this started with an artist who reimagined landscape painting. Last year was a 250 celebration of the birth of Caspar David Friedrich, and his work is being displayed at a major career retrospective. For the first time in the United States, it's happening at the Met. Friedrich's romantic landscapes evoke a sense of wonder or loneliness or spirituality. You'll likely know his painting Wanderer above the Sea Fog. You can see it on our Insta Stories at Instagram Olivet wnyc. While Friedrich painted in the midst of the Napoleonic wars in the 19th century, it was during World War II his work took on a new meaning. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party loved his depictions of German landscapes and thought they conveyed a sense of nationalism. After the war, Friedrich's paintings fell out of favor in the United States, but now the Met is mounting a major retrospective. The exhibit is titled Casper David Friedrich the Soul of Nature. It opened over the weekend at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it runs runs through May 11th. I'm joined now by curators. I hope I get this right. Allison Alison Hoekson Hokanson. Yes, Hokanson. Allison Hokanson is a specialist in 19th century Central European painting. And Joanna Shears Seidenstein, Did I get it?
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Joanna Shears Seidenstein
You nailed it, all right.
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Alison Stewart
Specializes in Northern European drawings and prints. Alison, why do you think there's never been a major exhibition of Friedrich's work?
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Allison Hokanson
There's never been a major retrospective of Friedrich's work in the United States for the quite simple reason that there are very few of his pictures in American museums. There are five paintings in American museums, including the Met. All of them are in the show. And about a dozen drawings. He quite simply wasn't collected here, in part for a reason that I think we'll talk about a little bit later on, which was a collapse of interest in German art in the wake of two world wars and the Holocaust. And the other side of that equation is that Friedrich is absolutely beloved in Germany. I mean, his reputation, even within Germany, has gone through a number of cycles since the 1970s, when he was recuperated essentially from this embrace of his work that took place in the Nazi era. He's become increasingly celebrated, increasingly popular. You know, people in Germany are almost on a first name basis with this artists. And so it's very special to have works that are so treasured and so meaningful in their home institutions. Come here in the United States so that we can at last see in depth an artist that we've only glimpsed.
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Alison Stewart
Joanna, let's learn a little bit about him. He and his family lived in Dresden. What was the art scene like in Dresden?
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Joanna Shears Seidenstein
Yeah. So Dresden was in this period a flourishing artistic center with amazing art collections, with a tradition of landscape representation, and perhaps most importantly for Friedrich, the circulation of romantic ideas. So he arrives in Dresden. He's born in the north, in Greifsfeld. He trains there, and then in Denmark at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. And then he chooses Dresden as his adopted home and spends his career there. And he arrives really just as these early romantic ideas are circulating. So these are ideas that are emphasizing individuality, subjective perception, emotion, spirituality, and new ideas about nature and the alignment between the natural world and the inner self. And this is what we see him absorbing and giving visual expression to in his work.
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Alison Stewart
What was Friedrich's reputation during his lifetime?
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Allison Hokanson
Friedrich's reputation during his lifetime, as I said, goes through sort of a series of changes.
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Alison Stewart
I wish people could see you because you're kind of using your hands like it could be. I'm not sure.
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Allison Hokanson
Yes, exactly. I mean, he really, of many of the artists that I've studied, has one of the most up and down, you know, experiences of the reception of his art. So he really lands with a splash in the first part of the 19th century. He makes his debut first with these beautiful ink wash drawings and then a little bit later as an oil painter. And this debut happens in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, which engulfed German lands. This was a period of great uncertainty, great tumult. Borders were reconfigured, national identities were reconfigured. It's a period of great anxiety for many Germans about what will happen to them. And so his work, which can often be quite melancholic, quite meditative, really strikes a chord. And his reputation continues on an upward swing through about the mid-1820s. And then landscape styles shift. Public taste changes. There are artists who are working in a more naturalistic style, something that feels a little bit more immediate. Artists who are working in a more grandiose, uplifting style. And Friedrich's art starts to fall off the map. People criticizing, criticize it as being too mystical, too weird, too artificial. And by the time he dies in 1840, he dies impoverished, and his work is more or less forgotten for a period of almost 30 or 40, 40 years.
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Alison Stewart
Joanna when we think about his compositions, specifically his landscapes, what stands out about his landscapes?
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Joanna Shears Seidenstein
So Friedrich had an extraordinary sensitivity to light, color, perspective, and vantage point. So what gives his work such distinctive qualities is. Is the way he brings these things together. So he will often choose a viewpoint that compresses foreground and background and even obscures the mid ground of a picture. And this can often create a kind of tension and kind of dynamism to the composition. So we feel ourselves like we are looking out over the horizon and kind of confronted with what lies beyond our apprehension. He also plays with symmetry. And so you'll have these compositions that seem almost too perfect, as if they're crafted exactly for where you're standing. And then very often he'll tweak something, so then something is thrown a little bit out of balance. And all of these things were so new at the time, as was the kind of reductiveness, the fact that he would simplify and he would even at one point, that you shouldn't force too much in the landscape. There shouldn't be too much detail. It shouldn't distract the viewer, and it shouldn't prevent them from having a kind of open ended imaginative experience of the image of the landscape.
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Alison Stewart
We're talking about the exhibit Casper David Friedrich, the Soul of Nature. It's open now. It runs through May 11th at the Met. My guests are curators Allison Hohekson. I'm going to get that right. And Johanna Scheer Seidenstein. We actually got a call from somebody who's went to see the show just yesterday. Let's check in with him. Hi, Andrew, you're on the air.
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Andrew
Hey, thanks, Allison, for taking my call. Yeah, I actually, I went on Saturday, which was the first day that the. The exhibition opened. For me, like, the real value of the show was just the Quality of the paintings was so top notch and I had not known about the artist, but I had been going to. I've been going to the Met forever. And I believe the only Met painting, the only painting that the Met has of his work is Two Gentlemen Looking at the Moon. And I've known that painting for so long. I've always loved it. I just never looked up the artist and looked at more of their work. So seeing that one of my favorite paintings at the Met in that show was just spectacular. Like I said, the quality of his work is just so far beyond. It really hooked me. I bought the exhibition book and then seeing that his later influences Edward Hopper, which reminded me the sunsets that Frederick does so masterfully was almost like referenced in Hopper's work or some of like the Monk by the Sea being referenced like with Mark Rothko's work. And I know it was like a long endeavor. I think it took six years to get all of his works together for this exhibition. And I really want to thank the, the people that I believe was your guest that put the show together because just outstanding, outstanding work.
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Alison Stewart
Thank you so much for calling. I'm glad you got your flowers. You're putting that together. If people know one painting, it's probably Wander above the Sea and Fog. You can see it on the exhibit. Joanna, why do you think that painting has become so famous?
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Joanna Shears Seidenstein
Well, that is a spectacular painting in which you see a single figure from the back. German term for this kind of figure is a ruckenfigur, literally back figure, figure from the back. And Friedrich presents him on this rocky peak, this outcropping looking out onto this glorious mountainous landscape, but one that is really obscured largely by fog and mist. And so it's this incredible play between vision and restricted vision. And so we see him having this experience and it encapsulates a concept from the period known as the sublime, which was a mixture of danger and beauty. Co curator Alison has pointed out many times that this is a period when hiking, when time in the mountains was first kind of considered an enjoyable pastime. And it was in part because of this kind of awe inspiring idea of nature that you could go out and be a little bit, a little frightened, you know, overwhelmed, overcome by the grandeur and beauty of nature. And that that was also an opportunity to reflect on yourself and discover something about yourself. And it really comes through in this picture, which indeed has had an incredible history in the 20th and 21st century. It shows up in certain, certainly many works of art. It's referencing in popular Culture and perhaps even in the way we ourselves take our own vacation photos.
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Alison Stewart
Oh, yes. You want to add something? Can I?
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Allison Hokanson
Yes. I wanted to tap into that and to say, I think there's also something about simply the way that this image is constructed. You have this very. It's very graphic in a way. You have the silhouette of the man in the foreground and then looking out over this vast landscape. And I think it's a work that taps into our inclination to project ourselves into a work of art, into a landscape. And it's also very easy to project ourselves onto this image because we see this figure from the back. There's so much that's left open about what this work means. We don't know what he is thinking, and so there's an invitation here to imagination and to place ourselves next to him or in his position. And I think that that has made it an image that's very open to engagement. You know, it's an image that's very easy to adapt to our own era, to our own relationship with the landscape.
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Alison Stewart
It's interesting because in his landscapes, there are people, but they're always seen from the back. Do you know why he did that?
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Allison Hokanson
Yes. So Joanna talks a little bit. Talked a little bit about this. So this motif, the figure seen from the back, which in German is called the ruckenfigur, literally a back figure, is something that is used in landscape painting to invite viewers engagement with the scene, to encourage us to imagine ourselves within the landscape. So Friedrich doesn't invent this motif, but he does explore it and magnify it in a new way. And so, instead of simply being a vehicle that encourages us to enter the landscape, Friedrich's ruck and figor become people, real psychological entities that we have to engage with. And so in his work, his figures are embodiments of this act of contemplation, whether it's contemplation of the landscape or contemplation of the work of art.
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Alison Stewart
There's a large number of his ink wash works, of Friedrich's ink wash works, and they look almost like sepia photographs in many ways. First of all, Joanna, would you describe for us the methodology of working within an ink wash?
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Joanna Shears Seidenstein
Absolutely. So, yes, these drawings are the works with which Friedrich first made his name as an artist. And he's using, most likely, and in some instances, we can be sure, sepia ink, which is material that comes from cuttlefish, from aquatic life. And it's something that is used in Italy, around the Mediterranean, but is introduced in Dresden. Right. Around the time that Friedrich is making his career there. And it's this beautiful ink that offers a lot of control. It dries very slowly, and so it can be manipulated in these really precise ways. And he is an incredible technician. And dilutes. It creates different dilutions of the ink to produce these beautiful skies and expanses of water with really subtle tonal gradations, and then is able to leave bits of the paper blank without any ink on it for the moon, for shimmering reflections. And even at the time, people were awed by what Friedrich did with it, by the virtuosity, the fact that this. A single color through monochrome, he could create these images. And we have to remember this is before photography. This is when photography is really just starting to be developed in France and England. And so he produces these works that, indeed, when you look at them today, you almost think for a second you're looking at a photograph. And through drawing in this material, he develops the compositional tactics and the sensitivity to light and tone that then we then see him deploy in his oil paintings.
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Alison Stewart
What do you admire about these ink wash paintings?
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Joanna Shears Seidenstein
Oh, my goodness. So they. You know, in a way, it's a perfect medium for depicting dusk, sunset, moonrise, because that is the. The time of day when everything goes dark and you can no longer discern colors, differentiations and colors. But for me, and I will say, just as the critics at the time said, it's the mood that he evokes. You know, he really captures that romantic spirit that. Those feelings of melancholy, of longing, of solitude. And it's so palpable when you look at these images. He's also choosing landscapes, either specific places that were recognizable to his contemporaries or imagined views that are very spare. And so there's a kind of minimalism built into the imagery itself that I think underscores those sorts of feelings.
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Alison Stewart
We are talking about the exhibit Caspar David Friedrich, the Soul of Nature. It's open now at the Met and runs through May 11. My guests are curators Alison Hochetson and Joanna Scheer Seidenstein. Yes, I got that, Alison. Some of the paintings in the exhibit are really quite small. Why. Let's start there. Why are they so small?
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Allison Hokanson
So Friedrich paints on a number of different scales, and so some of the works in the show are actually surprisingly large. But at certain periods in his career, he paints very intimately sized images, and there are different possible explanations for that. Part of it is that smaller pictures require less materials. And since he's painting these works effectively on spec, he doesn't often have a client who's commissioned them. And so it's economical, particularly if he's experimenting with a new motif or experimenting with new types of oil paint, that he might choose a simply, for practical reasons, would choose a smaller support. Another reason, I think, is that smaller works create a wonderful sense of intimacy. I mean, when you see them in the gallery now, they're hanging on the wall, but you can imagine that the people who initially owned these work, they would have been able to pick them up, they would have been able to handle them. And there is this wonderful aspect in his work of creating a world in this very small space. And so while the picture itself may be quite small, the sense of the landscape that you derive from it is vast. And when I look at these pictures, I often think of something quite different from Friedrich's painting, which is religious paintings from previous centuries, icons, objects of personal devotion, which he almost certainly would have known. And in a way, I think many of these smaller landscapes channel the feeling of these icons. It's a chance, an invitation to contemplate the landscape in this very personal way.
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Alison Stewart
Let's talk about the religious iconography. Was it considered controversial at the time?
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Joanna Shears Seidenstein
Joanna Some of his works certainly were, and that is because of the way he merges landscape and religious painting. So at the period, you know, there were these kind of strict genres, classifications, and landscape was one thing, and that was meant to be kind of decorative and, you know, separate from the religious sphere. And in one very famous example called the Cross in the Mountains, we have a. In the show, a related drawing, the painting is, which is in Dresden today, is too fragile to travel, but it is an image of a cross, a crucifix in the mountains, which was somewhat common in the German lands in the period. Something you might encounter as you go through the landscape. But the way Friedrich presents it, with the setting sun illuminating the cross and then framing that painting in this incredibly ornate frame with all kinds of religious symbolism, and then presenting it in his studio almost like an altar, really shocked his contemporaries and angered some. And there were many articles on the subject. And one critic famously wrote that it was as if landscape painting was slinking into the church and crawling up on the altars where it didn't belong. But in fact, what Friedrich was doing was giving a kind of visual expression to ideas in the period about spirituality and about nature as a site for spiritual encounters. And for him, as a somewhat, as a quite devout Lutheran, this was not mutually exclusive with this, a more traditional religious identity and practice, but was part of this broader phenomenon in the period. And indeed, Friedrich's. Friedrich's work does find, you know, receptive patrons and other artists who start to make works in that vein.
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Alison Stewart
We need to talk about the relationship between Friedrich and the Nazi Party. Alison, what was the relationship between the Nazi Party and Friedrich's work?
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Allison Hokanson
Well, the first thing to understand is that Friedrich dies in 1840, so 100 years, more or less, before the Nazis come to power in Germany. And the sense of Germanness, German national identity that Friedrich had, was quite different than that which arose in the Nazi era, in part because there was no unified German nation state. Instead, there are multiple German lands ruled by aristocrats. And so in Friedrich's period, there was a desire, but only that, only a desire to define what it meant to be German. You know, a kind of pan German identity that would subsume all these Saxon and Pomeranian and other different types of regional identities. And Friedrich's art in that moment takes part in that formation of a national identity and a national identity tied to the land. There are many symbols in his work, in particular, of the German past, whether it's the prehistoric past or ruins from medieval times. So this was imagery that he worked with. Because his pictures are landscape paintings, it's not always clear what meaning is intended. And very often there's a melancholic aspect to his depiction of these symbols of German culture. To me, in some ways, his paintings are about the longing for something that doesn't actually exist, right, which is this community, this communal identification, and this sense of shared identity tied to the land. When the Nazis come to power, they co opt Friedrich's landscapes along with a great many other beloved national symbols. And they present it as a manifestation of, as you said, of German nationalism, of true German patriotism. And in fact, the first book that is published in the United States on Friedrich is published in 1940 by the German Library of Information, which is exactly what it sounds like, a soft propaganda outlet for the Nazi party. And so Friedrich's art becomes entwined with Nazi ideologies, and it then becomes very difficult to separate his work from that historically and emotionally. Although even at the time in the 1940s, there are American critics writing saying that they hope that one day we can see Friedrich's art for itself, you know, separated from all these pernicious ideas that have become attached to it. And it has been a very long process since the 1970s, of teasing out the exact relationship between Friedrich's art, Friedrich's sense of nationalism and patriotism and. And Nazi ideology and what happens to that art later. For me, I think part of what we're really asking when we talk about Friedrich's art and the Nazis is to what degree is his work complicit, right in what comes later, and to what degree might we be complicit in looking at those works now? And for me, the answer is we are not complicit. These works are landscapes. They're made at a very different moment in this great historical arc of nationalism, national identity, patriotism. Friedrich himself did have some very strong patriotic feelings, particularly at the period of the French invasion and occupation of Germany during the Napoleonic Wars. But I think what all of this history does serve to do and what is important to keep in mind when looking at these pictures is it does remind us of what the outcome of this really fervent nationalism and patriotism can be and how much those ideals can become twisted. That too, if not part of the work when it was made, has certainly become part of the work's reception.
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Alison Stewart
This is a good text to end on. I love seeing the latest episode of Severance, which referenced Friedrich. The whole episode is color graded to match his tone of the wanderer above the sea and fog, as well as incorporating that with the mythology of Kier. Love seeing artistic references like this. That's from Phoebe in Woodstock. Casper David Friedrich, the Soul of Nature. Excuse me. The Soul of Nature. It's open now at The Met through May 11. My guests have been curators. Allison, I'm going to try it. Hocuson.
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Allison Hokanson
Yes.
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Alison Stewart
Thank you. And Joanna Shears Seidenstein, thank you so much for making time.
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Allison Hokanson
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
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