Caspar David Friedrich (German painter) 1774 - 1840
Mann und Frau den Mond betrachtend (Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon), ca. 1824
oil on canvas
44 x 34 cm. (17.32 x 13.39 in.)
Staatliches Lindenau Museum, Berlin, Germany
Controversy surrounds the date of the Nationalgalerie's version, Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, whose whereabouts before 1922 are unknown. In this painting, the light of early dusk creates a contrast between the darkened foreground and the luminous void of the sky. The silhouette of a dead tree with spiky branches and menacing exposed roots dominates the picture, and the two people seem stiff and mute. It has been suggested that the couple represents Friedrich and his wife Caroline.
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Friedrich's paintings in particular reflect a fascination with the moon that initially inspired mid-eighteenth-century poets and writers. These literary allusions are discussed in the accompanying catalogue's essay by co-curator Sabine Rewald. Long associated in folktales and myths with "the night side of things"—with magic, the semiconscious, emotions, fertility (or the feminine), the morbid, or the ghostly—the moon ignited a cult in Germany that revealed itself most vividly in the oeuvre of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). In Goethe's poetry and writing—as in the Romantic imagination—the symbolic meaning of the moon shifted from one of yearning and despair to serene contemplation to final demystification with the advent of rational, scientific inquiry. Goethe had actually offended Friedrich when he asked him for an illustration of clouds for a meteorological survey, unaware that to Friedrich, the sky—with its ever-changing mysterious light—was a phenomenon of the Divine.
Friedrich's landscapes rarely depict daylight or sunlight; rather, the paintings portray dawn, dusk, fog, or mist—phenomena that invite mystery. At the time, the German Romantic writer, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1771–1801), espoused what he had termed the "estrangement effect," which gave "the commonplace higher meaning—the familiar an enigmatic look, the finite the appearance of the infinite…the Romantic." The era's obsession with the moon was later crystallized in the words of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who, in around 1840, wrote, "Why has looking at the moon become so beneficiary, so soothing and so sublime? Because the moon remains purely an object for contemplation, not of the will. Furthermore, the moon is sublime, and moves us sublimely because it stays aloof from all our earthly activities…" Pious sharing of nature's sublimity—a Romantic view of friendship that was celebrated in life as well as in art—is a constant in the theme of Friedrich's pictures. The pairs of moonwatchers endow the landscapes with additional meaning.
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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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