Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), one of the great visionaries of European art, spent all his life in Northern Germany, apart from four years studying in Copenhagen, and his output appears to consist almost entirely of German landscapes. But far from being parochial, he was, in the words of the French sculptor David d’Angers, the artist who ‘discovered the tragic in landscape’. His paintings assemble minutely observed elements of nature into compo­sitions that celebrate the riches and the melancholy of a cosmos fully imbued with the divine, while never losing an almost hallucinatory engagement with reality. For all their clarity, they are the quintessence of Romanticism. Almost too familiar today, to Friedrich’s contemporaries these extraordinary paint­ings were astonishing and challenging. This volume records the reactions of some of the most prominent figures of German Romanticism: Kleist, Brentano and Arnim (in a witty series of dialogues between gallery visitors alternately bewitched and bewildered by Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea), the painter and physiologist Carus, the psychologist Schubert, the Russian poet and translator Zhukovsky. A piece by Goethe and his colleague Heinrich Meyer records the somewhat baffled admiration of the earlier generation; and Friedrich’s own Commandments of Art breathes the almost overwhelming passion with which he approached his vocation. An introduction by the leading scholar Johannes Grave situates Friedrich’s art and its reception in the context of the Romantic movement both in Germany and in Europe as a whole.

Tervetuloa Pohjoismaiden suurimpaan verkkokirjakauppaan! Adlibris kannattaa sananvapautta, ja haluamme edistää kirjallisuuden ja tiedon saatavuutta.

Depuis leur publication en 1831, les Neuf lettres sur la peinture de paysage du naturphilosoph Carl Gustav Carus ont ete universellement considerees comme le fondement theorique de l'esthetique du paysage romantique allemand. Medecin, naturaliste, geologue, auteur de traites sur l'inconscient et les reves ou il devance les ouvrages les plus modernes sur ces questions, ami de Lorenz Oken et de Humboldt, de Kleist et de Tieck, sa pensee est egalement proche de la philosophie de l'identite de Heinrich Gottlieb von Schubert et de l'idealisme de Schelling. Le present volume exprime sa position de savant et d'artiste - il a peint 400 tableaux - en face de la nature, son souci de la connaitre dans ses structures intimes, son aspiration a s'unir a elle dans une sorte de communion a la fois physique et mystique. Ce que dit bien le mot qu'il a employe pour definir la " peinture de paysage " mot intraduisible en francais, Erdlebenerlebnis (experience de la communion avec la vie de la terre) et Erdlebenbildkunst(art de la representation de la vie de la terre). Ont ete joints ici la traduction de son texte capital sur la Physiognomonie de la montagne et plusieurs extraits des Ecrits et lettres de Caspar David Friedrich dont la pensee et l'esthetique ont fortement influence et souvent inspire celle de Carus.