Mortal Nature - The Landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich

Nicola Freeman, September 2007

Nicola Freeman is Interpretation Editor at The National Gallery and the programmer for short films and animation.

Caspar David Friedrich, 'Winter Landscape', 1811. The National Gallery, London.

Dawn casts a limpid light over this bleak northern landscape: a field deep in snow, a group of fir trees, and in the distance, a Gothic church spire barely visible through the mist. 'Winter Landscape' epitomises the skills for which the German Romantic painter was celebrated: his mastery at effects of light and atmosphere, and his ability to capture what the Romantic movement saw as the melancholy of nature and its inherent spirituality.

But just as we begin to lose ourselves in the painting's mournful atmosphere, we notice a stick in the foreground, and our eyes travel quickly to another. They are the abandoned crutches of a man who is praying before a crucifix suspended in the tallest fir. We have been drawn into a narrative and now we see the landscape through the eyes of this character.

This was Caspar David Friedrich's contribution to cinema: adopting his resonant motif of a figure seen from behind, film directors were able to fully invest landscapes with a subjective gaze and externalise states of mind.

An earlier work by the artist, 'The Cross in the Mountains' (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, 1808) had provoked a scandal because of its apparent blasphemy; Friedrich's audacity was to paint an altarpiece that did not represent a traditional Christian story but instead depicted a simple cross on the summit of a fir-topped mountain, a common sight in the German countryside.

Although in 'Winter Landscape' Friedrich has included a small crucifix, it is nature itself here that signifies spirituality. With his careful composition, lucid brushwork and sensitivity to lighting, Friedrich encourages us to feel that the fir trees soar like the church spire behind, and that there is the glimmer of hope in the dawn light that weakly colours the sky. As the painter himself noted, his aim was not 'the faithful representation of air, water, rocks and trees... but the reflection of [the artist's] soul and emotion in these objects.'

The Lonely Wanderer
Friedrich would soon develop more iconic versions of the quiet human narrative we find in ‘Winter Landscape’. 'Wanderer above a Sea of Fog' (1818; Kunsthalle, Hamburg) is perhaps best known: a man with his back to us stands on a rocky outcrop, walking stick in hand, a light wind from the misty crevices below playing with his long black jacket tails and curly auburn hair - the classic Rückenfigur or 'back figure', cast by Friedrich as the lonely wanderer.

Friedrich was acutely aware of how the height of a horizon and the location of the vanishing point affect the relationship of the spectator to the view. Together with the sense of stillness created by his expansive landscapes, often enveloped in swirling mists and softly lit, such manipulations encourage us to see his figures as isolated and contemplative.

This powerful 'back figure' motif was quickly adopted into our visual language so that it intuitively signals a Romantic response to the natural world. Edvard Munch said of his painting 'Woman in Three Stages' (1894) that 'the light woman walking out towards the sea - towards infinity. That is the woman of longing'. While, almost a century later, Gerhard Richter produced 'Wald' (2005). Despite cool rebukes to the suggestion of a purely Romantic impulse behind these moody depictions of woodlands, Richter has said that, 'If the Abstract Pictures show my reality, then the landscapes... show my yearning'.

Colin Eisler has observed of Friedrich, 'The German painter often used a single aged or lightning struck tree to speak for existential hazard.' And this idea resonates in a recent work by British artist Tacita Dean. 'Crowhurst II' (2007) is an enlarged black and white photograph of an old gnarled tree, decaying and propped up by sticks, which Dean has overpainted in areas with white gouache. The title relates to the story of Donald Crowhurst, a lone sailor who encountered problems during the Golden Globe Race in 1968. Unable to face defeat, he faked his navigational records before finally throwing himself overboard.

And in cinema this motif has found its narrative voice. From the medium's earliest days it was recognised that landscape played a dramatic role in films. The critic Lotte Eisner describes how in 'Nosferatu' (1922) F. W. Murnau 'lingers over a filigree of branches standing out against a spring sky at twilight... He masks his materials with those combinations of mist and light to which the Germans are so sensitive.'

Eisner also notes how, like painters, film directors have manipulated light sources to the extent that they sometimes create abgrundlose Tiefen or 'depths without depths'. To create the shimmering haze in 'Winter Landscape', Friedrich used smalt, a blue pigment that is transparent in an oil medium. The effect is similar to the opalescent light of 'Mother and Son' (1997) by the Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov, who used special lenses and mirrors, and set painted glass directly in front of the camera lens to create his distorted, milky landscapes.

These are techniques that allow both film-makers and painters to free themselves from the limits imposed by essentially two-dimensional art forms. As Sokurov has said, 'I destroy real nature and create my own.'

Empty canvases
Though full of longing, Friedrich's views do not quite incite us to exclamations of beauty. There is too much mist, too little sunlight, and a certain uneventfulness; art historian Joseph Leo Kerner refers to them as 'empty' canvases. What this atmosphere of stillness tends to do is emphasise is the ineffectuality of the human figures. All they can do it seems is to stand and stare, to contemplate rather than participate. And this is at the very essence of a type of modern cinema that has distanced itself from the action-driven movie. Instead these films recognise that we often feel dislocated from the world.

Think of the almost imperceptible deterioration of the relationship between Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams) in 'Days of Heaven' (1978) as they drift through Terrence Malick's eloquent landscapes, or the inability of Port (John Malkovich) and Kit (Debra Winger) to respond in the face of the interminable desert horizons of Bertolucci's 'The Sheltering Sky' (1990). In 'Mother and Son' Sokurov skews the perspective so that sometimes the figures are dwarfed by the landscape, while at other times they appear to merge with the textures of their natural surroundings. All these characters are at the quiet heart of the drama that is the landscape.

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