“Even in his emptiest landscapes, he will erect some lonesome memory marker: a ruin, grave-stone, or wayside cross that introduces into a vast terrain the presence of the past.” Joseph Leo Koerner offers this insight near the beginning of “Moment, Memory, Monument,” his catalog essay for the exhibition Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The line is a reminder that Friedrich’s sublime vistas are actual places upon which bygone experiences are inscribed, and our moment contemplating them, like our time on earth, will, too, become the past.
Koerner, an art history professor at Harvard University, knows this all too well: Friedrich’s shadow stretches deep into his own past. While still in graduate school, he wrote Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (1990), a poetic study of the artist that continues to resonate with Friedrich scholars and fans. Since then, he’s expanded his scholarship to encompass German Renaissance art, iconoclasm, and witches, among other subjects.
His newest book, Art in a State of Siege (published this month by Princeton University Press), is especially timely, weaving together narratives of three artists working in states of emergency: Hieronymus Bosch, Max Beckmann, and William Kentridge. Currently, he’s working on the Vienna Project examining the city’s interiors as both physical and psychical spaces against the backdrop of rising fascism in the early 20th century. But, as he told me in our conversation below, “Friedrich is somebody who I will always love to talk about.” Koerner and I spoke via Zoom about his lasting love of the Romanticist painter and why his art continues to speak to so many of us. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Hyperallergic: I understood and appreciated Friedrich a lot more after I read your book on him.
Joseph Leo Koerner: With Friedrich, I found a great reciprocity between writing and his art. I really started my career not as an art historian, but as a writer about Friedrich. I wrote about the Rückenfigur in my junior year in college, and I enjoyed the idea of trying to describe this turned figure. When I was in Cambridge, I had a much stronger sense of my reading of the figure, which was darker and more paranoid. […] Then, about four years later, I was commissioned to do a book on Friedrich. I wrote the book very quickly, in I think it was eight months.
H: So his work must have just really spoken to you from the beginning.
JLK: I think that like many young people, one feels very much involved in one’s own self, very in touch with the way one’s self is omnipresent in one’s experience. So there was this artist who literally placed something like a self, bam, in the middle of his pictures. I didn’t necessarily know or want at that early stage to figure out what he meant by the turned figure and by extension, paintings that don’t have the turned figure, but there’s a subjectivity behind them. I wanted to write about what it feels like to look at one of these paintings. It was so much the quintessence of Romanticism, the feeling of what subjectivity looks like in a painted form. And I also love landscape. I was always a big hiker and mountain climber, so it all made sense.
H: People seem to love Friedrich’s work, so there’s something there. Why do you think people continue to connect with it?
JLK: I think one aspect is that they’re very, very, very beautifully painted and the more you see of his work, the more you feel how there’s something extremely mysterious and beautiful about these natural landscapes, the way everything is both very, very specific — each tree is exactly like a tree, each rock is not just a generalized rock, but is a real rock. And then the hazy, misty tonality, the way he puts between you and these flashes of real objects and real horizons and real hills this layer of mist, sometimes literally — mist in the valley. And then there’s a programmatic aspect, which makes them melancholy and profound, by using these figures who are there in front of you and have a very powerful effect on how you experience the landscape […] you can feel these people wandering. They are doing things that are not quite what you are doing when you’re looking at the painting, but kind of like what you’re doing, because they’re contemplating the world rather than either engaging with it through work or praying like somebody would do in a religious scene.
H: I learned a lot from your book about just the symbolism in the paintings, and how Friedrich got different ideas across through the compositions and the way that he maybe juxtaposed two trees.
JLK: I think he comes up with a formula — it’s in a way a formula because he repeats it quite often. People in his own time, once they got used to him, they started to complain that all his pictures looked the same. He comes up with a formula that combines a certain kind of randomness of the world out there that participates in the ways in which the world is also very particular: a tree isn’t symmetrical, it’s not even slightly symmetrical, it’s wildly erratic and specific. He brings in that random, specific, accidental character of the world, and then he makes it feel like there’s some kind of order to it by using symmetry and using figures in the center and so forth. So there’s this kind of vibration between a chaotic and particular aspect of everything and then a sense that it’s got to mean something.
When you’re walking through a landscape, especially in Germany and Austria and other places in Catholic Europe, you come on these wayside crosses. A wayside cross was probably originally erected for farmers as they make their way to the field, but they fairly soon become picturesque markers in a landscape through which you wander for enjoyment. Friedrich paints a lot of these wayside crosses, but he does something with them that is very interesting: He makes you feel that you, by extension of the painter, have somehow stopped to look at that wayside cross because it means something to you — not because it’s a religious thing, but you’re wandering and you see this wayside cross. And then what he does, which is the really revolutionary thing, is that he can take away the wayside cross and just show you a landscape, and the way he paints the landscape makes you feel like somehow there’s something that was there for the wanderer before you that meant everything to them.
That means that when you step in front of the picture you have everything that makes for this experience of, “this is the most important moment in my life.” But it’s not your moment. It’s somebody else’s moment, but you have a bit of a trace — you see it in a kind of ghostly way, because you aren’t the wanderer, the wayside cross isn’t even there. That is something that I have come to appreciate in revisiting Friedrich. That was my way back in: What do we do with all these markers and monuments and little milestones and wells and springs that appear in Friedrich’s art? What are they up to?
H: You noted in your book that he paints the landscape as something that is seen, not just as something that’s there.
JLK: He’ll show a random churchyard, right, with trees sticking up and graves that are veering in different directions because the graves are all collapsing and the snow is everywhere, but, he places the ruined church (which is itself no longer symmetrical) always at the center of the painting — which you don’t do. It’s totally unlike any artist of that period; ever since the 17th century, you put churches and symmetrical objects slightly to the side because you want to feel like you can wander your way through the landscape with your eye and take any path. But Friedrich does the opposite — he does this centralizing thing with a church or a tree, but the church or the tree isn’t symmetrical, therefore a story arises in the head of the viewer. Without saying it, you feel it that somebody has marched with their boots in the snow, wobbling along the soil until they find a part of the landscape that looks sort of organized, and that’s where they stand, and that’s where they paint.
The landscape is out there, and it has nothing to do with the human, but the painting says that some human has, in this randomness, found themselves at a place in which it looks symmetrical. But the moment they walk the next step, it’ll all get random again, so it’s a temporal moment when things look organized. And that’s what Friedrich wants to capture.
H: This isn’t really a question, but years ago I had a professor who said something like you find the whole world in a close reading of art.
JLK: The path that I then took in writing about Friedrich was to start in that close reading mode where you look at the painting and you tell the story of what you’re looking feels like. I deduced from that writing experience that the picture posited somebody before you who had come to the scene and looked at the scene. And the minute you think somebody was there before you, literally in the form of the turned figure, [you think] who was this person? And then all of a sudden the painting starts to slip away into the past. That made me think, okay, we can write a history of these works of art and find out who Friedrich was and what his time was. You don’t have to come to the painting and unload tons of information about romanticism and Germany and German nationalism and ideas of piety and Lutheranism. You start with the painting and the painting makes you need to ask the question. Who was this presence, this subjectivity?
H: The painting “The Cross in the Mountains” (1807–8) was actually controversial at the time, right?
JLK: I predict that the show will be positively reviewed, but it has always been the case that there are a lot of people who really dislike Friedrich. To some people it’s kitschy. Very early on, even while Friedrich was painting, there were people who thought it was too sentimental, too obvious. Goethe, for example, didn’t like Friedrich. So they’re still in a way controversial, but the [original] controversy had to do with the idea that that there’s religious art and then there’s landscape. Religious art is for belief and liturgy and worship and the church, and landscape painting is for leisure and aesthetic contemplation. The blurring of the boundaries between the two was unsettling. But “The Cross in the Mountains,” which won’t be in the show, is unsettling because you do have a back and forth. You have a much more heavy-handed symbolism [in the frame, carved by Christian Gottlieb Kühn]: Eye of God, eucharistic symbols of the wine and the bread. And then you have this landscape painting and it’s kind of weird. It was, and it’s still, a strange and puzzling combination.
H: You said in our email exchange that Friedrich is a touchstone for you in your life in general.
JLK: Yes. Because he’s a painter who combines works of art, which is what I study, with something that’s much more global about what’s important to me. I walk with my children through those landscapes; walking in the woods and hills and mountains is the way we are a family. It’s not just walking and seeing the natural world, but imagining there’s some way in which that activity encapsulates why one is alive. Friedrich makes it clear, there’s some kind of analogy between literally the path you walk and the temporality of your life. […]
I suppose he’s also a touchstone in the sense that I started with Caspar David Friedrich, and throughout time there’d be moments that I’d come back to him, including a very close friendship I had with a historian and philosopher of science, Bruno Latour. [“The Cross in the Mountains”] became for Bruno Latour a symbol of the earth and climate change and the problem of the Anthropocene. When he passed away, I reconnected to Friedrich in that way.
H: I can imagine people who’ve never seen Friedrich’s work in person before seeing it — it’s exciting.
JLK: Yeah, especially “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” is such an incredible painting, where the whole landscape comes from the heart. But it’s also quite reserved in a way; when you look at the painting, there’s something that’s so intangible.
“He brings in that random, specific, accidental character of the world, and then he makes it feel like there’s some kind of order to it,” says Friedrich expert Joseph Leo Koerner.
