One of the unexpectedly important things
that art can do for us is teach us how
to suffer. It can do so by evoking
scenes that are dark melancholy or painful
and that normalize and lend dignity to
the feelings of suffering that we might
otherwise be experiencing in isolation
or confusion. They reveal with grandeur
and technical skill that grief belongs
to the human condition. Caspar David Friedrich
a painter of sublime sadness
was born in 1774 in Greifswald, an ancient
trading town in the far north of Germany
on the Baltic coast. It was a beautiful
place in a severe northern sort of way.
As a child he loved the way the
pinnacles spires and towers at the town
loomed above the trees in the haze of
the very early summer mornings. His
father was a modest artisan of few words
and little warmth and his beloved mother
died when he was only young. When he was
13 he saw his younger brother Johann
Christopher fall through the ice of a
frozen lake and drown. He grew up shy
taciturn and intense. He was trained as a
painter from an early age, but there were
many years of poverty and hardship
before his distinctive style began to
emerge. The taste of the era favored
sunny classical landscapes. Summer in
Italy was the ideal. But Friedrich was
drawn to aspects of nature that up to
that point people thought of as
uninteresting and disagreeable cold, damp
mornings, glacial nights by the sea the
pale hour before the sun rises, the
flooded fields of late spring.
Frederich's first mature work, his first
big picture where he started to present
his own view of life was a shock to his
contemporaries. Instead of the
conventional angels, weeping saints and
soldiers he depicted the crucifixion of
Jesus is happening on top of a
mountainous crag amidst Teutonic fir
trees with the sun's rays striking the
clouds behind. Friedrich realized then
that nature could express many of the
solemn moods that had previously been
associated with the literal rendition of
the Christian story. With time he
dispensed with direct references to
Jesus all together. But he retained the
atmosphere of tragedy and grief
associated with his life and death.
He found that tall trees mountains, mists,
the rising of the moon, the stillness of
water at night, open heathland, and fog
could carry many the same messages about
pain, love, suffering and redemption as
the Christian theologians once found in
the Gospels. He remains a painter
uniquely suited to those who no longer
believe but who remain attracted to the
serious emotions that accompany belief.
In 1818 when he was 43 Caspar David
married 25 year old Christian Caroline
Bommer they had two daughters, Emma and
Agnes Adelheid and a son Gustav Adolf.
And it seems on the whole to have been a
pretty good relationship.
Caroline appears in many of his pictures
although usually alone. Friedrich was
drawn to painting people on their own
as if what is most important about us only
comes to the surface when we are away
from the chatter of civilization. He
himself only had a handful of friends
and rarely left his simply furnished
studio. Instead of solitude being
something that we need to evade with
business, drink, or sexual fantasies
Friedrich suggests it is something that
brings us into contact with our deepest
possibilities. He also believes that
harshness of nature could put the sorrow
of the human condition into a consoling
and redeeming perspective. Humans can be
cruel, fate can be remorseless, but
contemplating the ineluctable collision
of icepacks takes us out
of ourselve, beyond the
particular envy, wound, or disappointment
that is tormenting us
reducing our sense of personal
persecution. Works like moonrise over the
sea make us aware of our insignificance
in the vast natural world exciting a
sense of the pettiness of man's
disasters in comparison with the waves
of eternity, leaving us a little readier to
bow to the incomprehensible tragedies
that every life entails. From here
ordinary irritations and worries are
neutralized. Rather than try to redress
our humiliations by insisting on our
wronged importance we can, by the help of
a great art work, endeavor to apprehend
and appreciate our essential nothingness.
Friedrich uses this striking jagged rock
formation, a spare stretch of coast, the
bright horizon far away clouds and
pale sky to induce us into a mood of
redemptive sadness. The smaller islands
of rock were once just as dramatic and
thrusting as the major rock formations
just beyond, the long slow passage of
time will one day wear them down as well,
above the more clouds which catch light
on their undersides and pass on in their
transient pointless way totally
indifferent to all of our concerns. The
pitcher does not refer directly to our
relationships or to the stresses and
tribulations of our day-to-day lives. Its
function is to give us access to a state
of mind where we are acutely conscious
of the largeness of space and time and
the insignificance of our situation
within the greater scheme. The work is
sombre rather than sad, calm but not
despairing. In that condition of mind or
to put it more romantically state of
soul we are left as so often with
Friedrich's work better equipped to
deal with the intractable intense and
particular griefs that lie ahead of us.
Like many artists Friedrich was not
terribly successful during his own
lifetime. He was admired and his work
purchased by a small group of serious
people and two of the most delightful
painters of the era Kersting and Dahl
were his friends he died in his mid-60s
in 1840 almost forgotten. He did not know
that, in the distant future his work
would be deeply admired. Not because it
cheers us but precisely because it knows
how to reframe and express the sadness
that is part of all of us.