Mark Dery
Finding symbolism and the self in the landscapes of nature: seventy-five works by the preeminent painter of German Romanticism.
Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Richard Lee.
Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, curated by Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York City, through May 11, 2025
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“To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite,” the poet and philosopher Novalis (1772–1801) declared in his role as brand manager for German Romanticism. Mystical, morbid, and fashionably consumptive, Novalis was a standard-bearer for the cultural countermovement against Enlightenment skepticism, rationalism, and reductionism. Scientifically curious yet otherwordly, he preached the importance of artistic genius in decoding the book of nature. Contrary to the picture science gives us, we experience the world, first and foremost, not as factual, he thought, but as meaningful. By reading nature symbolically, sensitive souls (like, say, poets) revealed the spiritual significance immanent in the material world.
Caspar David Friedrich, Moonrise on an Empty Shore, ca. 1835–38. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
For Novalis, every forest was a forest of symbols—as it was for his fellow Romantic (and artistic genius), the landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). “The artist’s task is not the faithful representation of air, water, rocks, and trees, but rather his soul, his sensations should be reflected in them,” Friedrich believed. “The task of a work of art is to recognize the spirit of nature and, with one’s whole heart and intention, to saturate oneself with it and absorb it and give it back again in the form of a picture.” Note Friedrich’s subtle shift in emphasis from a hermeneutics of the world to nature as mirror of the self: art brings to light not only nature’s mysterious inner truth but, as important, the Romantic self, an intensely felt subjectivity whose self-consciousness is heightened by close encounters with the radical alterity of nature—its irreducibly “strange strangeness,” as the ecological philosopher Timothy Morton would say.
Caspar David Friedrich, Cave in the Harz, ca. 1837. Photo: HM The King’s Reference Library, Royal Danish Collection.
Friedrich’s best-known painting, the memed-to-death Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (ca. 1817), stages that epiphany as a glammed-up aesthete in a green velvet suit perched on a rocky outcropping, contemplating the dizzying plunge of a mountain valley shrouded in mist. Wagnerian in its high drama, the Wanderer has become shorthand, in the mass imagination, for Romanticism—specifically, the confrontation with the sublime that gives birth to the Romantic self as we shrink back into ourselves, awed by the wonder and terror of nature.
Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Richard Lee. Pictured: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, ca. 1817.
But, like all great works of art, it opens itself up to multiple interpretations. Friedrich’s use of the compositional device known as Rückenfigur (literally, “back-figure”)—an immersive gimmick that beckons us through the picture plane, inviting us to imagine ourselves as the subject—raises more questions than it answers: What does it mean to see what the wanderer is seeing if all he sees is a boiling cauldron of fog? Is the act of seeing—in the metaphysical sense Novalis had in mind, i.e., looking for the extraordinary in the ordinary, the strange in the familiar, the sacred in the mundane, the infinite in the finite—Friedrich’s real subject? I read the Wanderer as a philosophical meditation on the unseen and unseeable (because unnameable); the existential void, bereft of meaning, that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (himself no stranger to Novalis and the Romantics) would later call The Nothing (das Nichts).
Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Richard Lee.
For many, the Wanderer will be the showstopper in the Met’s Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, the artist’s first major retrospective in the States. But brilliance is everywhere in this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of seventy-five works seldom seen outside Germany. Friedrich’s darkly mysterious woods; lone, hoary oak standing sentry in the dead of winter in an empty field; leafless thickets, their branches interlaced like bony fingers; and writhing trees—gothic apparitions that look as if they’re poised to pounce on anyone foolhardy enough to go forest-bathing—are marvels of close observation, their every needle, leaf, bole, and branch reproduced with scientific accuracy, down to the minutest detail. Yet they also set the stage for what the curators, in their catalog essay, call Romanticism’s “radical new appreciation of the bond between nature and the self, one rooted in our spiritual, personal, and poetic comprehension of the natural world.”
Caspar David Friedrich, Figures Contemplating the Moon, ca. 1797–99. Courtesy W. M. Brady and Co. Photo: Mark Morosse. © Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Nature that represents nothing but its that-ness, its there-ness; the bare fact of its existence—like the generic specimens in Plant and Tree Studies (June 28, 1799), renderings in pencil, gray ink, and wash on paper that wouldn’t be out of place in a naturalist’s field notes—is rare in Friedrich’s corpus. More often than not, his landscapes are allegorical, littered with symbols. Figures Contemplating the Moon (ca. 1797–99), an early work in watercolor and ink, is a prime specimen: a lovers’ tryst on the edge of a moonlit lake is counterpointed by a mourner overcome with grief in an untended graveyard, its funerary monuments and headstones off-kilter and crumbling. These vignettes make Joanna Sheers Seidenstein (who, along with Alison Hokanson, curated the show) think of “the Sturm und Drang movement and sentimental literature in which moonlight plays both a symbolic and an atmospheric role,” specifically Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), in which the protagonist’s lover Charlotte declaims, “Whenever I walk by moonlight, it brings to my remembrance all my beloved and departed friends, and I am filled with thoughts of death and futurity.”
Caspar David Friedrich, Boy Sleeping on a Grave, 1803. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Mark Morosse. © Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Romantic melancholy wafts off Boy Sleeping on a Grave (1803), a lugubrious woodcut in which “the butterfly about to be caught in the spiderweb” alludes, the wall text informs, “to the body’s release of the soul through death.” In Cemetery Landscape with a Vulture (ca. 1834), done in pencil, brown ink, and wash, the carrion-feeder of the title roosts on the gravedigger’s spade, peering into a newly dug grave with the anticipatory relish of a diner awaiting the spécialité de la maison. Seidenstein draws parallels to the Dark Romanticism of Goya and Poe and hears echoes of Schubert’s macabre Totengräberlied (“Gravedigger’s Song”). All that’s missing is “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” by Bauhaus on the audio guide.
Caspar David Friedrich, Cemetery Landscape with a Vulture, ca. 1834. Courtesy Albertina Museum. Photo: Albertina Museum.
Then, in the artist’s final decade (documented in the exhibition’s last gallery, “The Great Beyond”), comes a startling development: humanity vanishes from his landscapes. Masterfully done in pencil, brown ink, and wash, these deeply strange works—Cave in the Harz (ca. 1837), whose jagged mouth yawns like a mantrap; Moonrise on an Empty Shore (ca. 1835–38), where hulking boulders loom out of a primordial mist; Dolmen near Gützkow (ca. 1837), a neolithic tombstone memorializing a lost race—exude an eerie quietude, as if the Earth were uninhabited and time itself becalmed. Grave caves, moonscapes, tombstones: premonitions of the artist’s mortality, obviously.
Caspar David Friedrich, Dolmen near Gützkow, ca. 1837. Photo: HM The King’s Reference Library, Royal Danish Collection.
Then again, Friedrich, who despite his didactic allegorizing was at pains to “give space for the [viewer’s] imagination to play,” and who counted it an artist’s “greatest achievement . . . to awaken thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the viewer, even if they weren’t his,” gives us license to interpret his work in the context of our moment. Read by the light of the Late Anthropocene, these haunting images look like visions of a quiet Earth, after the eco-pocalypse. They stir the emotion the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht calls “solastalgia”—the homesickness we feel for the world we used to call home; the distress we feel when a natural setting to which we have deep nostalgic ties is damaged or destroyed by anthropogenic disasters. Though they’re coming up on two centuries old, Friedrich’s posthuman landscapes look suddenly premonitory in the age of climate doom: they augur a World Without Us.
Mark Dery is a cultural critic, essayist, and the author of four books, most recently, the biography Born To Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. He has taught journalism at NYU and “dark aesthetics” at the Yale School of Art; been a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome, and a fellow at Hawthornden Castle near Edinburgh; and has published in a wide range of publications.