Academic literature on the topic 'Friedrich, Caspar David (1774-1840) – Esthétique'

The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) created the work of art Das Eismeer in the years 1823/24. Besides his painting Mönch am Meer it is his most radical painting. It depicts a dramatic and grim subject: A shipwreck in the Arctic Sea. According to different cultural, historical and social contexts there have been many different interpretations of his painting since it was produced.

Zusammenfassung Im vorliegenden Artikel wird die künstlerische Darstellung der für den Norden Europas charakteristischen, ausgedehnten Nadelwälder anhand eines Fallbeispiels aus der Kunstgeschichte untersucht. Bei dem ausgewählten Kunstobjekt handelt es sich um Caspar David Friedrichs (1774 – 1840) Gemälde Der Chausseur im Walde aus dem Jahre 1814. Zunächst erfolgt eine Bildanalyse unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Darstellung des Waldes. In diesem Kontext wird erörtert, wie der Künstler dieses Landschaftselement dargestellt hat und inwiefern jene Darstellungsweise mit der symbolischen Bedeutung korrespondiert. Ferner wird dargelegt, inwiefern das Fallbeispiel als Darstellung einer nordischen Landschaft aufgefasst werden kann. In einem weiteren Schritt wird untersucht, ob das Gemälde den Eindruck der Erhabenheit, der sich angesichts von Naturschauspielen einstellt, verbildlicht. Dies geschieht unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Friedrich Schillers Aufsatz Vom Erhabenen. Zur weiteren Ausführung einiger Kantischer Ideen aus dem Jahre 1793 und von Edmund Burkes Philosophischer Untersuchung über den Ursprung unserer Ideen vom Erhabenen und Schönen, die in einer ersten Fassung 1756 und dann 1759 erschien. Dabei liegt der Fokus auf der Frage, ob der im Bild dargestellte Nadelwald im 18. Jahrhundert für die Erweckung der Idee des Erhabenen als geeignet erachtet wurde. Obgleich sich von den entsprechenden philosophischen Traktaten keine Präferenz für eine geographische Region ableiten lässt, bediente man sich in der europäischen Malerei des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts häufig nordischer Landschaften, um die Idee des Erhabenen bildlich darzustellen. Da der Vorzug nordischer Landschaften in diesem Kontext bisher nicht restlos geklärt ist, wird abschließend diskutiert, inwiefern das behandelte Fallbeispiel zum Verständnis dieses Phänomens beitragen kann. Abstract This article focuses on the artistic representation of dense conifer forests as a feature characteristic of the landscape of Northern Europe. Caspar David Friedrich´s (1774 – 1840) Chasseur in the Forest, painted in 1813-14, serves as the case study for this article. In the context of the analysis of this painting, particular attention will be paid to the depiction of the forest. It will be investigated if the manner of representation corresponds to any symbolic meaning perceived in the depicted landscape. Furthermore it shall be examined, if the depicted landscape is of its nature a characteristically northern landscape. The analysis will take into account Friedrich Schiller´s essay Vom Erhabenen. Zur weiteren Ausführung einiger Kantischer Ideen on the question of the sublime, which appeared in 1793, as well as Edmund Burke’s work A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, the first version of which appeared in 1756, in order to discern if, during the early 19th century, the forest depicted in the case study was considered to be expressive of the idea of the sublime. During the 18th and 19th century, especially Northern landscapes were often considered to be suitable to visualize the idea of the sublime. So far this phenomenon remained unexplained to some degree. Hence the article deals carefully with the relevance of the case study to this question. Resumen Este artículo se centra en la representación artística de los densos bosques de coníferas como particularidad del paisaje del Norte. El cuadro de Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840) pintado en 1813-14, Chausseur in the Forest, sirve como caso de estudio en el que la imagen se analiza prestando especial atención a la representación del bosque. Este trabajo investiga si la forma de representar el paisaje se corresponde con su significado simbólico. Además, se investiga si el paisaje reproducido es, por su naturaleza, un paisaje del Norte. El análisis tendrá en cuenta el trabajo de Friedrich Schiller Vom Erhabenen. Zur weiteren Ausführung einiger Kantischer Ideen (1793) acerca de la cuestión de lo sublime y el ensayo de Edmund Burke Indagación filosófica sobre el origen de las ideas acerca de lo sublime y lo bello, publicado en 1756, para descubrir si el bosque representado en este caso de estudio hubiera sido considerado adecuado como representación de la idea de lo sublime a comienzos del siglo XIX. Los paisajes del Norte se consideraban especialmente apropiados como forma de visualización de la idea de lo sublime durante los siglos XVIII y XIX. Este artículo concluye analizando la relevancia de este caso de estudio en lo que respecta a un fenómeno que a día de hoy permanece inexplicado.

The article looks at the context in which young Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) developed his interest in the landscape of the Island of Rügen and the effects of this setting on the drawings the artist produced during his wanderings there. This article positions itself against the current scholarship which assumes that Friedrich’s fascination with Rügen had formed before the artist moved to Copenhagen to study at the Fine Arts Academy. Instead, this article shifts Friedrich’s attraction to the island forward, to his time in Copenhagen. The city was then the centre of European research into Ossian’s poetry and the Nordic past. The author points to the significance of the Island of Møn, popularized by Søren Abildgaard, whose son, Nicolai, Professor of Art at the Copenhagen Academy was one of the most active exponents of the cult of Ossian in Denmark. Another major figure connected with the Island of Møn was the poet and clergyman Christen Andersen Lund, promoter of English literature. The popularity of Rügen as a destination grew precisely at the time when Friedrich returned from Copenhagen to his native Greifswald. One of the major champions of the island’s beauties was Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, pastor at the Rügen Altenkirchen and at the same time a close friend of Friedrich’s first drawing teacher in Greifswald Johann Gottfried Quistorp. Friedrich’s first three excursions to Rügen in 1801–1802 resulted in many sketches of the island’s landscapes. These years are regarded here as seminal in the formation of the artist’s method. Already the sketches show the traits characteristic of his later oeuvre, and especially the mathematical structure of the composition. We need to remember that Quistorp was principally educated as a mathematician, a builder, and a land surveyor. Copenhagen at the time of Friedrich’s studies was one of the European centres of cartography, and the courses in mathematics, geometry, and perspective were considered of special importance at the Academy. This article focuses on four drawings made by Friedrich during his trips to Rügen. The author points to their mathematical precision and interprets the drawings in the context of cartographic practices, as well as in the light of old treatises on perspective. Special consideration is given to the method of laying out a grid on paper before making the actual sketch.

C. D. Friedrich est le plus souvent présenté, dans l’historiographie traditionnelle, comme un peintre oublié durant les décennies qui ont suivi sa mort à Dresde, en 1840. Peu connu en dehors de son Allemagne natale, il n’aurait été redécouvert que grâce à cette grande rétrospective de l’art allemand que fut la Berliner Jahrhundert Ausstellung de 1906. La première biographie du XXe siècle que lui consacre l’historien norvégien Andreas Aubert, Dieu, liberté, patrie (Gott, Freiheit, Vaterland, 1915) attire l’attention sur l’orientation politique et patriotique de certaines de ses peintures. Cette thèse propose de reconsidérer divers aspects de la réception de l’œuvre du peintre, en la plaçant, non plus dans le seul contexte allemand mais dans celui, européen, du XIXe siècle. Si Friedrich a été longtemps méconnu des historiens d’art, il devint, de par sa culture poméranienne germano-scandinave, une référence aux yeux d’artistes scandinaves, qui entrèrent personnellement en contact avec lui ou par l’intermédiaire de son voisin d’atelier, le peintre norvégien J C. C. Dahl. Sujet d’intenses débats, non exempts de considérations politiques, la peinture de paysage est également devenue un enjeu patriotique en Allemagne et dans les pays scandinaves. L’objectif est de préciser la place de l’esthétique de Friedrich dans l’instauration de traditions picturales nordiques, au-delà des affinités et résonances pouvant unir les œuvres entre elles. Le suivi de cette trajectoire, passant par les pays nordiques et parvenant en France, permet également de relancer la question de la réception de Friedrich dans les milieux artistiques français, où il n’a pas exposé
According to traditional historiography, Caspar David Friedrich was almost forgotten during several decades following his death in Dresden in 1840. Little known outside his native Germany, it is often said that he was rediscovered through the great retrospective of German nineteenth century art, the Berliner Jahrhundertausstellung, in 1906. The first biography of the artist published in the twentieth century, God, Freedom, Fatherland (Gott, Freiheit, Vaterland, 1915) by the Norwegian art historian, Andreas Aubert, draws attention on the patriotic orientation of some of his paintings. This thesis proposes to discuss different aspects of the reception of his oeuvre, not only in the German, but in the European context of the 19th century. If the painter was not recognized by the historians, he emerged, mainly thanks to his German-scandinavian Pomeranian culture, as a model among Scandinavian artists, who came largely through personal contact with Friedrich himself or via his neighbour and friend, the Norwegian painter J. C. C. Dahl. In the heart of intense debates in Germany and Scandinavia, landscape painting became a subject of political interest. This thesis is pointing the heritage of Friedrich aesthetics in the birth of Nordic painting traditions, beyond resonances and visual affinities between works. Following this itinerary through Nordic countries, reaching France, permits to question again the reception of Friedrich in French artistic milieux, where he never was on public display

La peinture de Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), connue pour être une peinture« métaphysique », ayant une forte charge symbolique, donne lieu à toutes sortes déconstructions idéologiques. Notre travail propose une réflexion, au travers de cet art et de ses interprétations, sur la notion même de « romantisme ». Il s’agit de montrer qu’un examen précis de la représentation que le romantisme allemand a de lui-même offre des possibilités herméneutiques encore en partie inédites pour qui veut comprendre Friedrich en tant que peintre romantique allemand. C’est ce que nous avons tâché de faire apparaître dans une approche philosophique qui associe présence au tableau comme objet capable de produire lui-même son sens, inscription dans le contexte des pensées contemporaines de cet art, et examen des résonances de ce romantisme dans l’art d’aujourd’hui. Recentrant l’interprétation du romantisme allemand sur la pensée de Novalis, nous avons pris pour fil conducteur la formulation du programme explicite de ce que lui-même dénomme la« philosophie romantique » dans un fragment célèbre (« Le monde doit être romantisé.C’est ainsi que l’on retrouvera le sens originel ») et qui fait du romantisme un concept opératoire, une opération ou technique — un « art de ». L’enjeu de cette thèse est de clarifier ainsi le sens philosophique de l’exigence romantique allemande, à entendre comme un idéal esthétique, donc comme un concept normatif, tout en cherchant à explorer dans la philosophie romantique de l’art le thème à nos yeux négligé de la peinture comme art visuel. A ce titre, elle n’est pas une monographie sur Friedrich, elle interroge, par son prisme, la philosophie romantique
The painting of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), known for being ‘metaphysical’ andstrongly charged with symbolism, has given rise to all sorts of ideological constructions.Based on this art and its manifold interpretations our study reflects on the very notion of‘romanticism’. It seeks to demonstrate that a precise examination of the representation that romanticism has of itself offers hermeneutic possibilities that still remain partially unexplored for anyone wishing to understand Friedrich as a German romantic painter. Our philosophical approach endeavours to pay close attention to the paintings as objects capable of producing their own meaning, as well as situating this art in the context of contemporary ideas and conceptions, and analyzing the resonances of this romanticism inthe art of today. Re-focusing the interpretation of German romanticism onto the thought of Novalis we have adopted as a guiding thought the formulation of a programme that explicitly terms itself “romantic philosophy” in a celebrated fragment (“The world must be romanticized. In this way one finds again its original meaning”), and which renders romanticism an operational concept, an operation, technique or method – an “art of”.Thus, the aim of this thesis is to clarify the philosophical sense of the romantic imperative,understood as an aesthetic ideal, i.e. as a normative concept, while seeking to explore inthe romantic philosophy of art the hit her to neglected topic of painting as a visual art.Accordingly, this work is not a monograph on Friedrich. Rather, through the prism of his art it questions the status and nature of romantic philosophy itself

Autour de 1800, la question des limites entre peinture et musique est un élément important du renouvellement du discours esthétique et de la pratique artistique en Allemagne. L'étude analyse ce phénomène par le biais des oeuvres de Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810) et Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). Elle s'attache à en comprendre la dialectique propre, oscillant entre le pôle de l'union des artset celui de l'unité des arts. Partant des limites supposées des moyens d'expression spécifiques à chaque art, le premier pointe la nécessité d'une complémentarité des médiums conduisant à concevoir une forme d'art les combinant ; le deuxième souligne leur analogie et renvoie à une essence commune de la peinture et de la musique. Devenue concept instrumental dans la pensée du premier romantisme, cette dernière est érigée en paradigme de l'ensemble des arts. Son utilisation vise à émanciper la peinture d'un mode de representation néo-classique qui impose une imitation du visible, et ouvre l'espace d'une réflexion sur la couleur et la ligne non mimétique. Cependant, la question de la réalisation d'une telle ambition, comme le souligne la comparaison entre les positions de Runge et Friedrich,demeure à cette époque en suspens.

The diploma thesis defines the therm "cliché" in art and specifically in photography. This definition stems from examining concepts that are closely related to cliché: paraphrase, kitch, copy, reproduction. The thesis also pinpoints various examples of cliché in today's photography. It follows the development of certain clichés and aims to answer the question that concerns the repetitive search and imitation of certain images, even by authors who are undoubtedly aware of their existence, as well as frequency.

Dans cette thèse d’histoire de l’art, nous posons un lien inédit entre la philosophie de Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) et quelques pratiques artistiques et/ou littéraires issues du premier romantisme allemand. Bien que ce lien ait été posé dans l’historiographie traditionnelle, il l’a été en tenant compte soit des contenus particuliers enseignés dans la Wissenschaftslehre de Fichte (théorie du sujet, théorie de la liberté), soit des opinions politiques de cet auteur (républicanisme, égalitarisme, universalisme du droit). Or, le projet romantique tel qu’envisagé par ces praticiens a pour matrice la dynamique pragmatique du message fichtéen, c’est-à-dire la structure aussi bien communicationnelle que pédagogique de ce dernier. Dans cette optique, en prenant pour cadre de référence la recherche actuelle en études fichtéennes, nous démontrons que Fichte est l’auteur d’un dispositif réflexif original dans lequel l’usager d’un système représentationnel donné se trouve indexé par le dispositif qu’il anime. Si bien que les fonctions de réception et de production du système—qui sont du ressort de sa performativité—s’avèrent parfaitement identiques. Par la suite, nous démontrons que le propre du projet est d’avoir déployé le dispositif pragmatique fichtéen dans des pratiques littéraires et plastiques, en vue d’engendrer un nouveau rapport entre l’image et la Bildung (esthétique, politique) du spectateur. Dès lors, la finalité de ce travail est de contribuer aux savoirs sur l’efficacité de l’art dans l’économie spectatorielle de la modernité et d’analyser l’apport de Fichte et des romantiques à la problématique actuelle de l’« agentivité » (agency) des images
The purpose of this art history dissertation is to shed new light on the relation between the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the artistic practice of some of early German romanticism’s leading figures, namely, Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, and Caspar David Friedrich. Although this link has previously been established in the historiography on German romanticism, I contend that Fichte’s importance to the romantic movement does not hinge on the content of his philosophical writings (i. E. , the Wissenschaftslehre as a theory of subjectivity or as a theory of freedom), nor on Fichte’s political beliefs (republicanism, egalitarianism, the universality of Right). Rather, the driving force behind the romantic project resides in the pragmatic dynamics of the Wissenschaftslehre itself, that is, on its communicational and pedagogical framework. In reference to the work of leading Fichte scholars, I argue that Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre consists in an original, self-referential representational system whose putative user is indexed within the very system he or she drives. In the final analysis, the reception of such a system coincides with its production, and both are a function of its performative character. Based on this approach, I contend that romantic artistic practices makes use of the Wissenschaftslehre’s pragmatic dynamics in order to rethink the way in which pictorial or textual representations shape their beholders (both aesthetically and politically). Ultimately, this dissertation aims to contribute to current debates on the power of images and to understand Fichte’s and the romantics’ heretofore unacknowledged contribution to the theory of the agency of images

I believe that Art happens in the exact physical space between a viewer and an image hanging on a wall. The viewer or beholder is something inherent to paintings but, for some artists and even for some periods of art history, the viewer gains a crucial place becoming the main point or initial reason for the conception of the work of art. Through the work of artists like Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Caspar David Friedrich, Édouard Manet, Thomas Struth, and Michaël Borremans, we can study a very specific relationship between the figures represented in the paintings and the possible beholder that sees them. The presence of a human figure in the composition of a painting always has a strong impact on the beholder and these artists explore that impact in a very subtle way. This relationship set between these two elements - the figure in the painting and the beholder – is of great interest to me and I develop it in own artwork. Particularly speaking, when the figure in the painting is represented in an absorbed posture, and we can see that in the work of these five artists, there is a slight suggestion of what is happening in the painting but without giving it away completely leaving mystery to a certain degree. It is in the visible that we see the most invisible

Tese de Mestrado, Pintura, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas Artes, 2009
The present essay tries to put forward a pictorial space perception in Heidegger’s thinking, taking as an object of study several of the author’s texts. In a first stage, we approach Heidegger’s thought on creation, where the conception of truth appears as original opening and disclosure, to then discover that it is through the artwork that its “thingness” manifests itself and where the essence of the creative act comes together in let-be the Being and in the making as to let-be the work of art. We also look into the existence of parallels between Heidegger’s and Buddhist thought. In the following chapter, before exploring Heidegger’s concept of pictorial space, we try to put forward how the concept has been looked at throughout time within the discipline of art history, referring to a select few examples that we consider to be fundamental in arguing our case. It is our conviction that the history of painting is a history of discontinuity, where each change is a radical rupture, a spacing that’s a new beginning. To know if we might speak and how we would speak of Heidegger’s pictorial space, in third Chapter we traced a path through Dasein and thing spaciality, so as to then grasp the meaning of concepts like space, time, place and emptiness. In the final chapter, we go back to the works of art, choosing those artists whose ways of doing echo our shared understanding of Heidegger’s thoughts, and therefore converging the analysis done all across the thesis. Overall, we try, through this investigation, to articulate Heidegger’s reasoning with an oriented analysis within art history, through a movement of approximation and removal, deepening the two-fold meaning of space in these two blocks – historical and conceptual – that make up that analysis. In conclusion, we establish our insight into the concept of pictorial space in the language of the thinker here being discussed and within the historical context, followed by a discourse on artists and works of art by us considered more suitable.