viernes, 1 de julio de 2016

LA SEÑAL DEL CUERVO


Christa Zaat

Caspar David Friedrich (German painter) 1774 - 1840
Der Chausseur im Walde (The Chasseur in the Forest), 1814
oil on canvas
65.7 x 46.7 cm. 
private collection

The French occupation of Germany was also the period of the painter's first success, much of which he owed to his adoption of specifically nationalist themes. The Gothic church, ruined or decayed, acquired a particular meaning for him, as did the German forest. When in 1814 he celebrated the expulsion of the French, it was with The Chasseur in the Forest, a haunting image of a solitary French dragoon lost in a wood of evergreens. It is a compassionate picture: the invader's fate is just and inevitable, but also sad, and seems to belong to the same higher natural destiny as the forest's vigorous growth.

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Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation.[2] He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".

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