About ten years ago, during a season of great freedom, I went for a hike in the Scottish Highlands. I had been living for some months in Ireland, thumbing rides and climbing mountains, and I had taken the boat to the Knoydart Peninsula to see how far I could push things. One morning, I set out to climb Ladhar Bheinn, a trip I’d been told would last seven or eight hours. It took nearly eleven, a journey through a high sodden landscape still crusted in late-May snow that left me soaked through and starving. By the time I tumbled down through the pastureland, not a single piece of my clothing was dry, and a hole had formed in my boot. I met no one on the trail, no one knew where I was, and in that remote place I could not even have called for help. It remains one of the dumbest, most dangerous things I have done in my life. And I do not regret it.
Is it any wonder I adore the Romantics? Attracted to the tempestuous and the extreme, they cracked the Enlightenment’s icy rationalism and dived headlong into a wild sea of passions. Yes, many of their descendants were monstrous—I will get to that—but their work still retains a visceral charge and a capacity to shock us with the power of the new.
As proof: the work of Caspar David Friedrich, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11. “The Soul of Nature” contains many of the artist’s most iconic paintings, works that have been reproduced and referenced and recontextualized for so many decades that you might think they would have lost some of their original energy by now. But stand in front of Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and try to resist its force. I certainly couldn’t. Again and again, I would walk away from one of the world’s most famous paintings, and again and again I would circle back, even though I knew exactly what awaited me there. Each time I looked at it, I shuddered.
It is not nothing for a 207-year-old painting to retain such power. Yet it is worth remembering that, in order for an artist to remain famous in our time, they must (usually) have been considered radical in their own. Friedrich was born in 1774 in the city of Greifswald, on a piece of the Baltic coast then ruled by the Swedish crown. Among the seventy-five works on display at the Met are some of his earliest pen-and-ink illustrations, already containing the elements that he would reconfigure throughout his career: monuments, graveyards, solitary figures contemplating the moon.
Yet soon these placid illustrations give way to substantially more turbulent works. Friedrich came of age in a countryside scattered with the ruins of castles and monasteries, evidence of many successive centuries of war, conquest, and reformation, and his landscapes are full of such eruptions of the irregular. He foregrounds rocky outcroppings and shrouds his carefully composed mountain views in a veil of fog. Often, he places a ruler-straight horizon in the lower part of the composition, drawing the eye up to face a stormy and inaccessible sky. Not for nothing did Kleist compare his storm-tossed “Monk by the Sea” to the apocalypse: from his vantage on those rain-hazed dunes, Friedrich does seem to be peering into the end of the world.
Kant divides the sublime into three categories: the noble, the splendid, and the terrifying. In his work, Friedrich combines all three. His landscapes are simultaneously wild and composed, the product of careful classical technique applied to personal feeling and experience. They beckon us onward with all those rückenfiguren journeying along forest trails and into high places. We not only view the scene, we seem to experience it, as if we were there ourselves, but we are never alone, for the painter is there with us.
Like many Romantics, Friedrich rejected the stern Lutheran God of his father and instead sought the divine in wild places. Early works depict this literally, placing crucifixes in overgrown thickets and high on stormy mountaintops. Yet even in the later paintings, which largely dispense with Christian symbols, Friedrich’s composed chaos reflects his view of a divine wholeness, a force that both orders the landscape and sets the unruly force of nature rushing onward.
Friedrich’s times called for such a vision. The Napoleonic wars shredded the patchwork of provinces, duchies, and principalities containing German-speaking peoples, and the painter had to flee the fighting around his home in Dresden. The volley of conquest and reconquest brought on waves of vicious anti-French sentiment, but also liberal yearnings for a unified German state that would cast off both French imperialism and Prussian feudalism. These hopes were decisively dashed at the 1814 Treaty of Paris and again in 1848. Yet they remain in Friedrich’s paintings, in those wanderers with their capes and berets, a liberal costume banned by the Prussians. Ideal figures set in ideal places: Friedrich’s invented landscapes combined features from distant lands, many of which he had never visited. He reconstructed them from other artworks according to his own artistic principles.
This desire—to forge a nation by synthesizing a landscape—spoke powerfully to Friedrich’s peers. Yet nationalism was not an exclusively liberal aspiration, and when Germany finally came together, it was as a monarchy. Later, the Nazis, too, had an ideal landscape; they tore down Eastern cities to make way for a pastoral paradise of shimmering grain. Hitler loved Friedrich, whose work continues to find new admirers among neo-Nazis of all kinds—from X Groypers to National Socialist black-metal bands to Kanye West.
For them, Friedrich represents an idealized past of natural communities deeply rooted in history. Never mind that Friedrich himself was a liberal who lived through a period of intense upheaval, and that his work is full of confusion and melancholy, not gung-ho nostalgia. These contemporary admirers imagine themselves as the masculine figure in “Wanderer above a Sea of Clouds”—their backs heroically turned to the rest of the world, preparing themselves to tame the wilderness. But in the end they are much more like Friedrich’s “The Chasseur in the Forest,” lost in a dark and shadowed wilderness of their own making.
Friedrich painted a lot of sunsets and moonrises, a symbol of rebirth on the other side of death. There is much peace in his silhouetted figures searching the sky for the evening star, which, though only a pinprick, draws the eye away from the great gleaming moon. Yet there is also a destabilization there, a sundering of seemingly united things. Walking through the exhibition, I would return to “Morning Mist in the Mountains,” and I found that while I looked at it, I was clenching my fists as if trying to hold on to something.
It was a feeling of profound disintegration but also a kind of euphoria, and it brought back my memory of climbing Ladhar Bheinn almost exactly a decade ago. There was a moment deep into the hike when a gale of wind walloped me, and I felt like a candle whose flame was flickering. Standing there, completely exposed, I felt as if the mountain breathed through me. For a moment, it didn’t matter that my stomach was empty, my legs exhausted, my feet soaked and freezing. I was simply up there in that high place, and I was on fire. “The Soul of Nature” is one of the rare exhibitions that offers something like this feeling in a museum gallery.
