Caspar David Friedrich at the Met #1

"Nothing can be sadder and more disconcerting than this position in the world: the only spark of life in the vast realm of death, the lonely center of a lonely circle."

A little over a week ago, I went to New York to see The Soul of Nature an exhibition of Caspar David Friedrich at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I have a lot to say about it, so this newsletter is the first in a series in which I discuss the artist, the exhibition, and whatever else comes to mind.

I was annoyed, I’ll admit that. As much as I dislike playing the academic pedant, who jealously guards his turf against the incursion of “lacunae” and “failure to engage with the literature”, I’ll admit that I was annoyed to see Heinrich von Kleist’s review of Monk by the Sea quoted, yes quoted, but its author not identified, not Kleist who was writing but just “a writer”, according to the painting’s label, as if Kleist were just some hack reviewer, otherwise lost to history, instead of a canonical figure of German culture engaging with a canonical figure of German culture, while both of them, moreover, were at the peak of their creative powers. It seems important.

That Heinrich von Kleist was a marginal figure in the literary scene in the 1810s is neither here nor there; Caspar David Friedrich wasn’t exactly a critical darling either. Goethe had a distaste for Monk by the Sea, commenting privately that the painting could be “looked at standing on one’s head”. Another negative review— intended for the public this time—was to be published in Kleist’s newspaper, the Berliner Abendblätter, but Kleist intervened personally, radically rewriting the piece, which led to a permanent break between him and the original reviewer, the poet Clemens Brentano. So we have not one but three canonical writers commenting on a canonical painter—no lightweights, no nobodies. Goethe, the most canonical German writer of all, doesn’t get a mention. (If this “lacuna” is something that you would like to fill, I have a long essay on the subject in Greg Gerke’s Socrates on the Beach magazine.)

Let me indulge the critic’s habit of making whatever annoys me into a cultural diagnostic: having Kleist omitted (his name at least) seems a bellwether—(sounding adverse conditions)—about the relative status of literature among the arts, not to mention the status of the arts in general. The science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson gives his commentary for the exhibition’s audio tour, but this is mostly confined to him recounting backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevadas. You’d be forgiven for thinking that German Romanticism didn’t involve much writing at all. But the era is fascinating and instructive precisely because of how porous the borders between disciplines were. A painter would educate a poet who would educate a philosopher who would educate an economist. Friedrich is intimately tied to Kleist who is intimately tied with Hyden who is intimately tied with Goethe who is intimately tied with Spinoza, and so on and so forth.

Nowadays everyone is too siloed, too narrowly specialized, too dumb. One of the most popular and influential music artists of the last quarter century brags about his supposed illiteracy, while, on the other hand, one of its most acclaimed novelists has not seen a film or a gallery exhibition in more than fifty years. I wager that Gerald Murnane’s work will stand the test of time better than Kanye West’s, despite the latter being so much more well-known than the former. Murnane’s peculiarities, like never being fully immersed in water or never flying in an airplane, are much more charming and generative of good books that sit with you a long while, but those books are hermetic, their aesthetic prescriptions doctrinaire, and cherished by those who, unlike their particular Literaturpapst, deplore the contemporary media environment but are unable or unwilling to reject it wholesale. The great writers of Friedrich’s era were never so withdrawn.

But what about the painting itself? It was glorious to see it in person. It’s big: 43 inches by 67. As metaphors go, “a broader canvas” is less abstract than most. And abstract is the watchword. A close inspection of Monk by the Sea—discouraged by the museum guards, of course—shows details, shows whole sections that would not be out of place in a Rothko. J.M.W. Turner is the undisputed master of modernism before modernism but much of Friedrich’s work—Monk by the Sea and his late drawings in particular—also anticipates a turn away from figuration, from classical perspective and classical subject matter. It was controversial in Friedrich’s own lifetime for those very reasons.

The scale of the painting is hard to convey in a photograph but so is the luster of the paint. The seaside dunes are not so much pale as they are lunar, glowing with a bluish tint. This is all the more striking since the scene takes place in the daylight, albeit daylight obscured mist and sea spray. Kleist writes that the painting appears to be gazing back at us in its austere, confrontational simplicity. But our gaze is confronting the painting too. We, as living mobile beings, represent an impossible world the monk, frozen as he is in his upright, almost stentorian pose. The whole fabric of his reality can be shredded by a single rustle of the grass. Our gaze, guided by the lights of the exhibition hall, finds itself reflected in the dunes, the first incursion into a sad but harmonious world. That’s why, I think, Kleist ends the review the way he does, by concentrating on viewers of the exhibition, those “who, in pairs, pass by the picture from morning to evening.” This was the same last week as it was two centuries ago: shadowy figures whisper their commentary, while the monk, his back turned to us, gazes out at a petrified sea.