page_title: Caspar David Friedrich
section_title: Influence
hierarchical_section_title: Caspar David Friedrich / Legacy / Influence
caption_attribution_description: English: Totes Meer (Dead Sea) 1940-1 Paul Nash 1889-1946 Presented by the War Artists Advisory Committee 1946 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N05717Français&#160;: Mer Morte.
context_page_description: Caspar David Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. 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 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".
  Friedrich was born in the town of Greifswald on the Baltic Sea in what was at the time Swedish Pomerania. He studied in Copenhagen until 1798, before settling in Dresden. He came of age during a period when, across Europe, a growing disillusionment with materialistic society was giving rise to a new appreciation of spirituality.
context_section_description: Alongside other Romantic painters, Friedrich helped position landscape painting as a major genre within Western art. Of his contemporaries, Friedrich's style most influenced the painting of Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857). Among later generations, Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) was strongly influenced by his work, and the substantial presence of Friedrich's works in Russian collections influenced many Russian painters, in particular Arkhip Kuindzhi (c. 1842–1910) and Ivan Shishkin (1832–98).  Friedrich's spirituality anticipated American painters such as Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917), Ralph Blakelock (1847–1919), the painters of the Hudson River School and the New England Luminists.
  At the turn of the 20th century, Friedrich was rediscovered by the Norwegian art historian Andreas Aubert (1851–1913), whose writing initiated modern Friedrich scholarship, and by the Symbolist painters, who valued his visionary and allegorical landscapes. The Norwegian Symbolist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) would have seen Friedrich's work during a visit to Berlin in the 1880s. Munch's 1899 print The Lonely Ones echoes Friedrich's Rückenfigur (back figure), although in Munch's work the focus has shifted away from the broad landscape and toward the sense of dislocation between the two melancholy figures in the foreground.
  Friedrich's modern revival gained momentum in 1906, when thirty-two of his works were featured in an exhibition in Berlin of Romantic-era art. His landscapes exercised a strong influence on the work of German artist Max Ernst (1891–1976), and as a result other Surrealists came to view Friedrich as a precursor to their movement. In 1934, the Belgian painter René Magritte (1898–1967) paid tribute in his work The Human Condition, which directly echoes motifs from Friedrich's art in its questioning of perception and the role of the viewer. A few years later, the Surrealist journal Minotaure featured Friedrich in a 1939 article by critic Marie Landsberger, thereby exposing his work to a far wider circle of artists. The influence of The Wreck of Hope (or The Sea of Ice) is evident in the 1940–41 painting Totes Meer by Paul Nash (1889–1946), a fervent admirer of Ernst. Friedrich's work has been cited as an inspiration by other major 20th-century artists, including Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), Gotthard Graubner and Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945). Friedrich's Romantic paintings have also been singled out by writer Samuel Beckett (1906–89), who, standing before Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, said "This was the source of Waiting for Godot, you know."
  In his 1961 article "The Abstract Sublime", originally published in ARTnews, the art historian Robert Rosenblum drew comparisons between the Romantic landscape paintings of both Friedrich and Turner with the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko. Rosenblum specifically describes Friedrich's 1809 painting The Monk by the Sea, Turner's The Evening Star and Rothko's 1954 Light, Earth and Blue as revealing affinities of vision and feeling. According to Rosenblum, "Rothko, like Friedrich and Turner, places us on the threshold of those shapeless infinities discussed by the aestheticians of the Sublime. The tiny monk in the Friedrich and the fisher in the Turner establish a poignant contrast between the infinite vastness of a pantheistic God and the infinite smallness of His creatures. In the abstract language of Rothko, such literal detail—a bridge of empathy between the real spectator and the presentation of a transcendental landscape—is no longer necessary; we ourselves are the monk before the sea, standing silently and contemplatively before these huge and soundless pictures as if we were looking at a sunset or a moonlit night."
  The contemporary artist Christiane Pooley gets inspired by Friedrich's work for her landscapes reinterpreting the history of Chile.
caption: Paul Nash, Totes Meer (Sea of the Dead), 1940–41. 101.6 x 152.4 cm. Tate Gallery. Nash's work depicts a graveyard of crashed German planes comparable to The Sea of Ice (above). Nash described the image as a sea, even suggesting that the jagged forms were not metal but ice.[77]
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