Friedrich's Monk by the Sea

Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Juliana Kreinik, Dr. Steven Zucker, Chad Laird

Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, c. 1809, oil on canvas, 43" x 67 1/2" (110 x 171.5 cm), Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Mussen, Berlin

Friedrich the modern
It seems strange now but for a while the art world turned its back on the German
painter Caspar David Friedrich. Aside from being cursed with the label of Hitler’s
favourite artist, for much of the twentieth century the Impressionists, with their
loose, painterly style, were held to be the fathers of modern art. Friedrich’s work
in comparison was considered too meticulous, too precise, too finely detailed
to warrant serious critical attention. Over the last few decades though the tide
of opinion has turned. Now it is generally accepted that both in his technical
brilliance and theoretically in his views of what the purpose of art should be,
Friedrich was as radical as they come. But if proof were ever needed again of his
credentials as one of the great forerunners of modern art, then The Monk by the
Sea would have to be it.

Caspar David Friedrich, Abbey in the Oakwood, 1810, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Mussen, Berlin

A new departure
Exhibited in the Academy in Berlin in 1810 along with its companion piece The
Abbey in the Oakwood, it depicts a monk standing on the shore looking out to sea.
The location has been identified as Rugen, an island off the north-east coast of
Germany, a site he frequently painted.

The monk is positioned a little over a third of the way into the painting from the
left, to a ratio of around 1:1.6. The same ratio can be found frequently in Western
art and is known variously as the golden ration, rule or section. Aside from
this nod to tradition however there is little else about this painting that can be
described as conventional.

The horizon line is unusually low and stretches uninterrupted from one end of
the canvas to the other. The dark blue sea is flecked with white suggesting the
threat of a storm. Above it in that turbulent middle section blue-grey clouds
gather giving way in the highest part to a clearer, calmer blue. The transition
from one to the other is achieved subtly through a technique called scumbling
in which one colour is applied in thin layers on top of another to create an ill-
defined, hazy effect.

The composition could not be further from typical German landscape paintings
of the time. These generally followed the principles of a style imported from
England known as the picturesque which tended to employ well-established
perspectival techniques designed to draw the viewer into the picture; devices
such as trees situated in the foreground or rivers winding their course, snake-
like, into the distance. Friedrich however deliberately shunned such tricks.
Such wilfully unconventional decisions in a painting of this size provoked
consternation among contemporary viewers, as his friend Heinrich von Kleist
famously wrote: “Since it has, in its uniformity and boundlessness, no foreground
but the frame, it is as if one’s eyelids had been cut off.”

The monk
There is some debate as to who that strange figure, curved like a question mark,
actually is. Some think it Friedrich himself, others the poet and theological
Gotthard Ludwig Kosegarten who served as a pastor on Rugen and was known
to give sermons on the shore. Kosegarten’s writings certainly influenced the
painting. Von Kleist, for example, refers to its “Kosegarten effect”.

According to this pastor-poet nature, like the Bible, is a book through which
God reveals Himself. Similarly, stripping it of any literal Christian symbolism,
Friedrich instead concentrates on the power of the natural climate and so
charges the landscape with a divine authority, one which seems to all but
subsume the figure of the monk. With nothing but land, sea and sky to measure
him by, his physical presence is rendered fragile and hauntingly ambiguous.

The ruckënfigur
Originally the figure was looking to the right. His feet still point in that direction.
Friedrich altered this at some point, having him look out to sea. The technique
of positioning a figure with their back towards the viewer is often found
in Friedrich's art; the German word for it is the ruckënfigur. This, the first
instance of it in his work, is somewhat atypical in that the monk being so small
and situated so low on the horizon does not ‘oversee’ the landscape the way
Friedrich’s ruckënfiguren generally do.

The technique is much more complex and intellectually challenging than those
found in the picturesque. Acting as a visual cue, the figure draws us into the
painting, prompting us, challenging us even, to follow its example and simply
look. And so we do. Yet its presence also obscures our line of vision and rather
than enhancing the view in the end disrupts it. In this sense, the ruckënfigur
while reminding us of the infinite beauty of the world also points to our inability
to experience it fully, a contradiction that we often find expressed in German
Romantic art and literature.

A political statement
Napoleon’s army was occupying Prussia when the painting was completed and
art historians have naturally looked to read the painting and its companion,
which depicts of a funeral procession in a ruined abbey, as a comment on
the French occupation. It would have been dangerous to be openly critical of
Napoleon’s forces so the paintings’ political messages are subtly coded.

Both paintings were purchased by the young Crown Prince, Frederick William,
whose mother, Queen Louise, had died a few months earlier at the age of 34.
An extremely popular figure, she had pleaded with Napoleon after his victory
to treat the Prussian people fairly. Her death surely would have been fresh in
people’s minds when they saw the paintings, a tragic loss which was very much
associated with the country’s own defeat by the French.

The presence of death is certainly felt in The Monk by the Sea, though in the
monk’s resolute figure we also find a source of spiritual strength, defiance even,
standing, like that gothic abbey and those German oaks in its pendant, as much
perhaps a symbol of the resolve of the nation against the foreign military rule, as
of the individual faced with his mortality.

The Romantic
Like Constable, Friedrich drew on the natural world around him, often
returning to the same area again and again. Unlike the English painter’s more
scientific or naturalist approach, though, Friedrich condensed the image so as
to communicate an exact emotion. As he put it, “a painter should paint not only
what he sees before him, but also what he sees within himself.” It is this inward
reaching project, using colour and form to reveal emotional truths, that singles
him out as one of the greatest and most innovative painters of his age: a true
Romantic.

Text by Ben Pollitt