Caspar David Friedrich's Winter Landscape

On the meditative power of mystery and ambiguity

Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape (1811?)

On a recent trip to London, I came across Caspar David Friedrich's painting Winter Landscape at the National Gallery. I was struck most of all by the disparity between the painting's small frame (32.5 x 45 cm) and the immensity of its subject matter. Dwarfed by many of the works around it, Friedrich's meticulous piece suggested the meditative power of a small and humble scene.

The work depicts a desolate landscape where a cluster of trees, dusted with snow, remain green in the depths of winter. Among the trees is a wooden sculpture of the crucifixion, and, if we look closely, a man can be seen praying before it. Clues in the foreground lead us towards him, crutches he has abandoned, either in haste or humility. He is the only human being in the painting, and we can assume that he is some kind of traveller wandering through a wilderness.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the painting is the vague symmetry that exists between the trees that tower over the human form, and a tall cathedral structure that is appearing out of the mist. The caption at the National Gallery suggests that the cathedral could symbolise the afterlife, a state of peace and calm that awaits the devout traveller. What interests me more is the unstable status of the cathedral itself. For example, can we assume that the traveller held the building as his final destination? His path, marked by the crutches, certainly suggest that direction. Or, is the cathedral a figment of the traveller's imagination? Maybe it is a figment of our imagination as viewers? Its status remains uncertain. The cathedral remains shrouded, hovering in the distance, neither fully present nor completely absent.

Let us assume, for a moment, that the cathedral is imagined. If this is the case, then the traveller remains far from his destination, even lost. The title, Winter Landscape, becomes an apt description of the traveller's hopeless situation. As a result, the trees become the only sign of life or rejuvenation among the rocks, ice and snow. In this reading, the traveller's meditative state conjures a mystical sense that sanctuary remains close at hand. He is at home anywhere, when at prayer, no matter how remote or isolated his location.

While I do not consider myself religious in any traditional or conventional sense, I remain fascinated by the role that religion plays in the development of literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Friedrich's Winter Landscape certainly draws upon religious themes, but I think it can be appreciated regardless of one's theological attitudes. It prompts us to ask broader questions about the human condition. What is our place in the world? To what degree are we all, in some way, solitary creatures? What role does prayer, meditation or deep reflection play in a meaningful life? How do we create meaning? What is the role and importance of faith in ideas or beliefs?

While the painting might have been intended to perform a didactic function, where there is a clear lesson to be learned, I think it's strength lies in its mystery and ambiguity: those aspects of the painting's narrative that remain inscrutable, no matter how hard we look.

In researching the painting, I discovered that it is the only example of Friedrich's work that is publicly available in London, and that it is one of two copies that exist in the world. London's National Gallery, naturally curious, wanted to find out if their copy was the original:

Discovered in a private collection in 1982, Friedrich’s moody Winter Landscape was acquired by the National Gallery five years later. The painting appeared identical in nearly every respect to a version that had been in the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund since 1940. Yet only one version of the composition was recorded in 19th-century documents, so which painting was the original?

Identical or not?

Although the two paintings appear at first glance to be identical, there are minute details in the London painting that do not appear in the Dortmund picture. The most noticeable are the gateway in front of the church and the blades of grass poking through the melting snow in the foreground.

The distant church is rendered with exceptional clarity and detail in the London painting, comparable to similar structures in other works by Friedrich. The same feature in the Dortmund version is little more than a hazy silhouette, with no discernable architectural features. While the Dortmund painting is rendered with a broad, spontaneous touch, the precise, controlled handling of the Gallery’s work in fact relates more closely to Friedrich’s early style of painting. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Beckett's Germany
• Winter Light: Caspar David Friedrich
• Beckett and Painting: Caspar David Friedrich
• X-Radiographic: Seeing Through Edward Hopper
• The White Review Interview: Max Neumann

Beckett's Germany

The artistic and philosophical influence of German culture on Beckett's writing

Rembrandt, The Money Changer (1627)

Derek Scally surveys a new way of thinking about Samuel Beckett's work:

After Beckett’s death, in 1989, his nephew, Edward, discovered six notebooks in a trunk: diaries from his first German phase, a six-month journey through the country in 1936-7.

It was a sensational find: 500 handwritten pages of the only diary Beckett ever kept, extracts of which were first published in Prof James Knowlson’s 1996 biography, Damned to Fame.

Since then the diaries, though studied and cited by academics, have remained unpublished and are a matter of speculation, dispute and friction among Beckett scholars. How best to reconcile the known Beckett, the Irish Nobel Prize literary laureate who lived in France, with the unknown, “German” Beckett?

“The idea of Beckett as the Irish Frenchman is deeply entrenched and may be difficult to dislodge, both in academic and non-academic circles,” says Dr Mark Nixon, a Beckett scholar and the head of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading.

But, slowly, efforts are gaining momentum to establish Germany next to Ireland and France as part of a triumvirate of Beckett’s cultural influences.

For Beckett scholars Germany is no longer just a place where his work was well received after he became a name, but a cultural spring from which Beckett drank thirstily in his formative years.

Erika Tophoven produced Beckett’s Berlin, in 2005, an illuminating and accessible volume putting his first stay in the capital in its historical context. Last month Nixon published the first critical analysis of Beckett’s German diaries. Now Beckett’s German publisher, Suhrkamp, has secured agreement with Edward Beckett, executor of the estate, to publish a three-volume annotated edition of the diaries.

Two decades after his death, what Knowlson calls Beckett’s “artistic pilgrimage” has moved into the limelight, offering an intriguing portrait of the artist as a young Germanophile.

“People will be surprised,” says Knowlson, “at how much Germany had an impact on him and how much some of his later attitudes – politically as well as aesthetically – were nurtured and moulded at this stage.”

[...]

“He is formulating an aesthetic,” says Knowlson. “He is going into a whole zone of being that has not been explored by artists, the zone of loneliness, the inner world, probing into the inner world, probing a whole area of ignorance and impotence, and I think that began in Germany.” Although he spent much time alone – “how I ADORE solitude” – Beckett left his Baedeker guidebook bubble and forced himself to meet locals to improve his spoken German.

“How absurd,” he wrote, “the struggle to learn to be silent in another language.”

After learning French and Italian he began a serious effort to teach himself German around 1930. To his friends’ amusement, he was soon ploughing through heavy fare such as the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

“Beckett liked the precision of the German language, which the French language didn’t have,” says Nixon. “He liked reading Schopenhauer for his style rather than content.”

Before his departure for Germany he began an exhaustive course of German art and culture while trying to teach himself German. In a lengthy trawl of German literature, he studied closely Goethe’s use of the autobiographical in his work just as he, Beckett, was struggling with his own “self-writing”.

He had much to do in his tour: after visiting public galleries, often dismayed at works deemed “degenerate” and removed by the Nazis, he had introductions to meet artists forbidden from exhibiting.

Despite the intense earnestness of his endeavour, a sociable and humorous Beckett emerges from the diaries, too. In Hamburg, his first stop, the diary is filled with bar jokes and lewd remarks spotted on toilet walls. Scribbled over a men’s urinal: “Come closer to prevent envy arising.”

Artist Roswitha Quadflieg, who used Hamburg diary extracts in a 2006 exhibition in the city, says, “It was all so exhausting for him because trying to register, filter, retain everything.” Her show caused a sensation, she says, because Beckett’s youthful diary entries were such a contrast to what she calls the humourless “grey eminence” that emerged from the later German translations of his work.

Beyond his deep immersion in the language, his German trip infused Beckett with a rich store of images he would draw on throughout his career, stored in a “photographic memory”, says Knowlson. The stage set of Krapp’s Last Tape , he suggests, is a “virtual reproduction” of Rembrandt’s The Moneychanger , which Beckett saw in Berlin.

In Dresden, Beckett records in his diary a “pleasant predilection” for a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Observing the Moon , reflected in the staging of Waiting for Godot.

On his final stop, in Munich, Beckett records a memorable encounter with Karl Valentin, a tragic comedian located somewhere between Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, whose trademark shambling style may equally have fed into Godot.

Beckett left Nazi Germany on April 1st, 1936, physically and emotionally exhausted, but with a rich cultural-linguistic collage forming in his head. It changed him as an artist and left indelible marks on him as a man, too. [Read More]

Derek Scally, 'Beckett's Berlin'

The irish Times, 9 July 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Samuel Beckett's German Diaries to be Published
• Samuel Beckett and Germany
• 'As The Wind Takes Me': Beckett in Hamburg, 1936

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Saul Bellow, Letters

Literature:

Will Self: This month's Featured Artist on A Piece of Monologue
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Goethe's Light
Paul Celan: Stephen Mitchelmore on the Bachmann/Celan correspondence
Saul Bellow: Letters, to be published 04 November 2010
J. M. Coetzee: Nobel Prize Lecture
10 Classic Stories of Suburban Ennui
Bret Easton Ellis: Interview with AskMen
Apocalypse in Literature and Film
Chick Lit: NPR discusses the genre
Thomas Bernhard: A guide to the complete English translations of Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard/Thomas Mann
Barney Rosset: Obscene, a documentary on Rosset and Grove Press
Paul Auster: An excerpt from Auster's forthcoming novel, Sunset Park

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Samuel Beckett: Online academic journal sends call for papers on Beckett and cliché
Sigmund Freud: One-day conference at the Anna Freud Centre: Psychoanalysis and Surrealism in the digital age
David Lynch: Video footage now available of the Mapping the Lost Highway Conference

Theatre

Thomas Bernhard: Canadian production of Ritter, Dene, Voss

Film & Television:

David Lynch: Video footage now available of the Mapping the Lost Highway Conference
Twin Peaks Weekender: 30 hour marathon of every episode at Battersea Arts Centre, London
Watch Chris Petit's Radio On free online
Barney Rosset: Obscene, a documentary on Rosset and Grove Press

Art, Design & Photography:

Stanley Donwood: San Francisco exhibition, 2010
Caspar David Friedrich: A short extract from Joseph Leo Koerner's The Subject of Landscape
40+ Stunning Minimalist Book Covers
Vincent van Gogh: Painting recovered after being stolen from Cairo museum
Visual Editions

Etc.

Will Self: Bigness and Littleness

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Winter Light: Caspar David Friedrich

John Coulthart on the influential German painter

Artist and designer John Coulthart has made some interesting observations on the work of German painter Caspar David Friedrich:

[...] Snow scenes tend to inspire picturesque cliché but in Friedrich’s paintings winter is merely another season in which to evoke his Christian mysticism through the depiction of landscape. The pagan dolmen above is an unusual subject, far more common are churchyard ruins and mountainside crosses although he was also happy enough painting luminous landscapes, especially of mountains and the sea. His treatment of natural light is quite extraordinary and his photo-realist style makes an interesting contrast with the similar effects captured by JMW Turner’s palette of blurs and smears. [Read Article]

John Coulthart, 'Winter light'
Feuilleton, 21 December 2009

'Human, All Too Human': BBC's Nietzsche Documentary

1999 BBC film on the life and work of Friedrich Nietzsche

In 1999, the BBC broadcast a trilogy of documentaries discussing leading influential philosophers of the 20th Century. Named after Friedrich Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, the focus fell on the European tradition of what is loosely termed Continental Philosophy, and discussed the life and work of three major thinkers of the last two hundred years.

The first of the episodes guides us through Nietzsche's life and work with the help of some esteemed scholars in the field. The British writer Will Self makes a brief appearance, as does the wonderful Reg Hollingdale (translator of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and other German philosophers). And while much of the documentary comprises all-too-brief summaries and the occasional oversimplification, it's still a fun and accessible guide to the philosopher and some of his major ideas.

Much of the imagery in the documentary reinforces the public perception of Nietzsche as a kind of dark romantic, conquering the mountains of some lost Caspar David Friedrich landscape; and if that's the kind of quality that pulled you toward Nietzsche in the first place, you won't be disappointed. On the other hand, if you're looking for a little more to hang your hat on, then the programme also attempts to make Nietzsche relevant to contemporary concerns and anxieties prevalent in twenty-first century culture. In short, it presents us with one of the first truly modern philosophers. Some really are born posthumously.

You can watch the documentary in full by clicking above, or find it at the source at videos.google.com.

Beckett and Painting: Caspar David Friedrich

On the influence of Friedrich on Samuel Beckett's work

Excerpted from William Vaughan, 'Friedrich':

'Perhaps the most surprising and intriguing of connections of that time is that of Friedrich to the Irish existential playwright Samuel Beckett. Beckett toured Germany in 1936, where he was greatly impressed with the works by Friedrich that he saw on view.

'In this way this is ironic since the prominence of Friedrich in German galleries at this time was for the purpose of promoting Nazi ideology. But Beckett could respond - as Kleist had before him - to the searing loneliness conveyed by Friedrich, to the anxiety that lay behind all that staring into the distance. When in Dresden, Beckett was particularly struck by 'Two Men Contemplating the Moon'. He confessed 'a pleasant predilection for two tiny languid men in his landscapes, as in the little moon landscape, that is the only kind of romantic still tolerable, the bémolisé [in a minor key]. Later he made clear that it was this image that formed the visual source for his most famous play, 'Waiting for Godot' (1953). He specifically drew attention to this fact when in Berlin in the 1050s, arranging for a performance of the work. The situation in Beckett's play, that of two tramps holding a half-slapstick dialogue in a barren landscape beneath a dead tree, can certainly be seen as having a parodic connection to Friedrich's pair of contemplative dissidents.'