Reflection – Painting the Transcendent with Caspar David Friedrich
The Large enclosure (1832). Oil on canvass 29 x 40 inches
As regular readers of these reflections will know, my main area of research has been an examination of the way in which artists have endeavoured through their paintings or drawings to give us just a glimpse of the numinous, the transcendent, that sense of the otherness of God which is so difficult to describe in words. Expressed differently, the artist engages with the state of mind of the viewer to achieve an elevated or heightened emotional response to the work of art which may suggest a transcendence that lies behind the objects painted. One of the masters of this category of painting was Caspar David Friedrich who lived from 1774 to 1840 during the height of the Romantic Period.
In this evocative painting of the River Elbe, near Dresden, Friedrich has taken the viewer into the very centre of the picture by an extraordinary use of distorted perspective, almost to the point of achieving a sense of the Transcendent itself. Not only is the horizon located very close to the point of the golden mean, but also there is an hyperbolic effect created by the curving lines which emerge from the two foreground corners of the painting and then meet in the centre with the curve of the clouds just above the horizon completing the effect. Just above this meeting point there is the low point in the curving horizon created by the rising hills to the right and the rising trees to the left. The art historian William Vaughan refers to the ‘strange urgency to this picture [given by] the oddly distorted perspective, the ‘fish-eye’ view that the artist appears to have taken of the scene, so that, when standing before the actual canvas, we have to get very close indeed for it to fall into place’.[i] Werner Hofmann takes a more scientific approach to the hyperbola effect referring to:
the curves [which] do not lie two-dimensionally within the picture plane but bend through space. They correspond, but do not create any linear axes of central perspective. Friedrich leaves a gap to peer through (for those who are mathematically inclined, an isomorphic, Euclidian space, to be more precise), and invents an airy space which moves simultaneously towards us and away from us.[ii]
Friedrich certainly achieves the two of the criteria which the theologian Rudolf Otto set out for producing an atmosphere in which the viewer may appreciate the numinous by creating the effect of a huge space as well as the light/ dark contrast (chiaroscuro) of the water and the marshy grass. As well as meeting the Otto criteria, Friedrich also in this painting emphatically meets the that criterion I mentioned above where: ‘The artist engages with the state of mind of the viewer to achieve an elevated or heightened emotional response to the work of art which may suggest a transcendence that lies behind the objects depicted’.[iii]
In summary, this is a picture of a desolate huge landscape demonstrating, once again, mankind’s infinitesimality in the face of God’s creative power, mankind being represented by the small boat which is sitting on the mud bank (just off-centre right), perhaps awaiting the rising tide or perhaps abandoned forever. In the ethereal nature of this work Friedrich is articulating that inner sadness, hinted at in many of his earlier works, with a strength that comes with knowing that his own departure from this world cannot be long awaited. Friedrich is here expressing ‘the tragedy of landscape’ a phrase from a comment by David d’Angers (1788-1856) which I believe so often underpins the works of Friedrich, for the artist seems to have found it impossible to come to terms with the death of his brother – without whose action Caspar would not have survived.[iv]
In similar vein, Hofmann writes:
Man has shrunk to a marginal element in this dialogue, and the sailing boat stranded in the shallow water … serves only as a reminder of human insignificance. The painter, however, marrying the earthly with the cosmic, is excepted from that marginality, as are we who follow him in experiencing the two-fold wake of the double [hyperbolic] curve. Friedrich takes us into the picture, but does not build up any confidence in the world we see there. Instead he uses perhaps the most paradoxical of all his special constructions to create his fundamental theme: withdrawal from the world.[v]
[i] Vaughan, W. Friedrich. London. Phaidon Press 2004p.290.
[ii] Hofmann, W. Caspar David Friedrich. London. Thames and Hudson 2007. p.236.
[iii] Podro, M. The Manifold in Perception – Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand Oxford Clarendon Press 1972, pp. 1-6.
[iv] Vaughan W. (2004) p. 295. Friedrich’s brother Johann Christoffer died while rescuing the young Caspar from a frozen lake – a tragedy which surely contributed to Friedrich’s melancholic outlook on life.
[v] Hofmann, W. p. 237.
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