Product: Romantics & Realists: Friedrich [VHS]
Rating: 3.0
A German Landscape Artist
In school, I liked history and English classes more than science and math ones. I'm more excited to learn about the Incas themselves than to see Machu Picchu. The paintings in pyramids fascinate me more than pyramids. In short, people inspire me much more than things. So, I prefer figure painting over landscapes. Thus, this work on a landscape artist didn't draw me in like those who focus on people. Still, Friedrich did have small human images in his work. This documentary never says if he was inspired by Eastern art, but he did live decades before the Japanist craze of the late 1800s.There are so many names of French, Dutch, or Italian painters that I could rattle off, but this is one of the first times that I've seen a work on a German painter. He did try to address issues of national identity in his oeuvre. However, he didn't do it in the scary way that the world would see in the mid-1900s.Like Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, his brother died in front of him and at an early age. Like Kurt Cobain and Virginia Woolf, this work says Friedrich was depressed. Still, I am a bit surprised to hear psychological terms being used decades before Freud was to write and establish the field.Some things don't add up here. The narrator speaks of a rainbow that Friedrich painted. However, the rainbow was monochrome, rather than multi-colored and it was gray, a color not even included in real rainbow. It practically looked like the St. Louis Arch. When the narrator speaks of Friedrich's painting of a shipwreck in the Arctic, the work shows stock footage of penguins. Hello! Penguins like in Antarctica, not to the North.