The Painter Who Revolutionized Landscapes

hey everybody if you haven't heard i wrote a book of essays that'll be out this spring and you can pre-order it with the links in the description below as we say goodbye to the holidays and move into january we also say goodbye to the festive and charming part of the winter season now comes the grim punishing bitter months of winter the endless months when all that enchanting snow turns to icy sludge what we need now as always is an artist who understands us and for this time of year there's no better artist than casper david friedrich friedrich was a german painter of the early 1800s with a very serious looking face he's associated with german romanticism a rising intellectual and artistic movement of the period that sought to reconnect humanity with feeling and spirituality the painters of that period found that connection in nature and so landscape painting became a genre of special significance friedrichs landscapes represent the pinnacle of this movement working for most of his life from dresden he focused largely on the austere beautiful often wintry environment of northern germany with its fur and oak trees mourning mists harbors and shorelines along the baltic coast and the rugged terrain of the hearts mountains his paintings don't always depict real places though often he took elements from various sites and fused them together into an invented composition he saw in his mind's eye that might be what gives his work such power friedrichs landscapes are realistically rendered but the landscape is not the subject of these canvases the subject is the feeling he has in the presence of the landscape the staggering encounter with the divinity he sees in it this is the essence of the sublime in the german philosophical tradition the sublime is a power or force or beauty that is so great it exceeds our ability to comprehend it and we stand before its immensity in awe and terror the sublime was a critically important idea in the period after the enlightenment when secularism was threatening the core of christianity as artist anoka farouki points out citing thomas mceverly the romantics could replace the enlightenment's discredited christianity with the sublime and once again they found the sublime in nature or rather they found it in themselves for immanuel kant great german philosopher and theorist of the sublime this immensity escapes our power of judgment but the fact that we're able to experience it at all means that it does correspond to something in us a sublimity discoverable in the mind in his landscapes friedrich is trying to paint that moment when the sublime in nature stirs the sublime in us which is why he made such revolutionary use of the rooken figure or the figure seen from behind like this one in his most famous painting wanderer above the sea of fog you're encouraged to put yourself in the shoes of this person gazing across the misty mountain tops into the infinite sublime but as far as friedrich's rooken figures go this one is actually a bit of an anomaly for the most part friedrich's human figures are tiny compared to the landscape they're contemplating and that augmented the vastness of the terrain the human body is our most natural anchor to determine the scale of things and it's also what we're inescapably drawn to in any image so there's no better way to simulate a sense of bigness than by featuring miniature people as an aside this is a technique that denis villeneuve used to great effect in his dune movie from earlier this year what's singular about friedrichs landscapes is the environments he chooses to elicit the sublime you might expect sun dappled colorful blue sky pastoral images but much more often than not friedrichs landscapes are ominous and nebulous dominated by rolling mists and fogs that obscure objects in the distance the trees are barren their branches contorted like sharp fingers and once great gothic cathedrals are reduced to ruins in the snow it's in these landscapes that friedrich gives us nature at its most intimidating and therefore at its most sublime after all the sublime like i said before includes a feeling of terror the terror of being in the presence of something far more vast than ourselves of being at the mercy of what we can't wrap our arms or our minds around pastoral landscapes in their idealized beauty imply man's control his dominion over nature in friedrich's stark landscapes man so small against the world is not in control at all this is why friedrich is the perfect artist for winter this is why so many of his canvases are set in these grim punishing bitter months he shows us the value of being humbled by nature and winter is the most humbling season of course for the last two years nature has humbled us plenty more than just the winter has been grim so maybe friedrich is a painter not only for this season but for our times as we stand on the shore of the moment weary not quite as big as we imagined we were peering into the fog ahead [Music] hey everybody thank you so much for watching this episode was brought to you by squarespace if you don't know you can use squarespace to make beautiful websites for anything you might need a personal site a wedding website a site for your business or portfolio and in just a few clicks you can have that website up and running their design team has crafted templates that work on computer browsers and on mobile switching perfectly between the two you can integrate your own photos and videos with just a few clicks and you can even link your social accounts so you can auto post to twitter and facebook all from within squarespace head over to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch that site go to squarespace.com nerdwriter for 10 off your first purchase thanks guys i'll see you next time

Channel: Nerdwriter1

Views: 306,842

Keywords: the nerdwriter, nerdwriter, nerdwriter youtube, youtube nerdwriter, nerd writer, nerdwriter1, nerdwriter channel, video essays, essays, education, education channel, nerd writer essays

Id: CeG0EWhv38A

Length: 6min 55sec (415 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 01 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/zirfeld]

If you speak German, there is a very good documentary available on the mediathek from ARTE:

Caspar David Friedrich - Wanderer zwischen den Welten

It explores deeper not only the art, but also the personality of Friedrich that lead to it.