The Met debuts a show for tired eyes and sapped souls

In a world that doesn't hold still, where electronic images swirl endlessly before us, storming our eyes, the art of Caspar David Friedrich invites relief and something else.

An exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art opening next week makes plain the “something else” – the look of forever. The Met puts it another way with the show title “The Soul of Nature.”

Usually, when you think of spirituality in painting, visions of the Madonna and Child or the Crucifixion come to mind. Friedrich’s art is worshipful painting of another kind – landscapes that convey celestial wonder.

Friedrich visions depict the smallness of the human figure when seen in the vastness of nature. His subject, then, is not man but man’s relations with nature.

Typifying this subject is “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” describing a solitary figure narrowed by the breadth of the sea and density of fog. Friedrich shows you a human being experiencing the infinite.

No small thing and the art world loved him for it – until it didn’t. Friedrich fell out of favor when the Führer favored his work. Hitler was big on Arcadian settings.

But he misunderstood Friedrich’s work when he famously said, “Art must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world.”

Friedrich wasn’t trying to cleanse the world. He was trying to connect to something larger than himself – namely, eternity. But his indirect association with the Nazis tarnished him and museums stayed away from him in the post-war years, and he died in poverty, all but forgotten.

It was only last year on the 250th anniversary of his birth that his native Germany decided to give him back his glory days with celebratory exhibits throughout the land.

But wait. While Germany gets credit for rediscovering Friedrich, England did it back in 1972, when London’s Tate Museum presented a show that contributed to the renewed interest in his work.

The Met’s Friedrich show comes late to this story. The St. Louis Museum of Art added his work to its collection of German modernism in 2018.

The St. Louis Museum, which specializes in German modernism, purchased a small oil at a Sotheby's auction for $2.75 million titled “Sunburst in the Riesenge” (referring to the mountain range between Poland and the Czech Republic).

But unlike the usual press coverage for an artwork selling for millions, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch focused on the painting, not the price. This contributed mightily to the cause of art appreciation – in this case, the ethereality of Mother Nature.

The newspaper informed its readers that the painting is about more than geography by quoting museum curator Simon Kelly. She pointed out that the image “sums up Friedrich's approach to landscape as symbolic of the wider themes of life, death, and the promise of eternity.”

With that, the dollar amount for the picture took second place. The newspaper also cited Sotheby's catalog description of Friedrich's picture parts and what they may mean:

The rocky foreground symbolizes the transience of earthly life; the solitary hut is a reminder of the smallness of humankind in the universe; the upright fir trees stand for “the faithful who will inherit eternal life…a harbinger of divine sanctuary.”

How unusual is a mainstream newspaper's up-close look at art? Very. When the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was robbed in 1990 of its Rembrandt, Vermeer, Manet, and Degas - a combined loss of $200 million, that amount became the story.

Even The Boston Globe, the museum's hometown paper, ran a headline that said, “$200 million Gardner Museum art theft” and never talked about the significance of the artworks in the story that followed.

Kudos to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for digging deeper. Of course, there are details that enlighten and those that mire in minutia. I'm thinking of art historians who get stuck in their research and miss the big picture.

Albert Boime of the University of California, Los Angeles did that when he contended in Colin Eisler's 1999 book “Masterworks in Berlin” that the figure in Friedrich's “Monk by the Sea” was the artist.

That's like guessing who modeled for, say, Da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks. Boime even went further, saying the cliffs that the monk walked were where a Protestant mystic built a church for fishermen far from home. None of which speaks to the painting's evocation of awe a lone figure imparts as he stands before a vast ocean.

“Monk by the Sea'' shows a single figure miniaturized by a great sea and its mighty swells. You don’t need to know the monk’s identity or the name of the ocean to appreciate this.

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