Caspar David Friedrich: The Invention of Romanticism

Description

FRIEDRICH, Caspar David (Illustrator) and Hubertus GASSNER (Editor). Caspar David Friedrich: die Erfindung der Romantik; [Museum Folkwang, Essen, 5 May to 20 August 2006, Hamburger Kunsthalle, 7 October 2006 to 28 January 2007]. Museum Folkwang Essen; Hamburger Kunsthalle Munich: Hirmer, 2006. 383 pages: numerous illustrations. Quarto format, hardbound. Very good condition. Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) was a German writer, artist and draughtsman, now regarded as one of the most significant artists of German early Romanticism. With his constructed pictorial inventions oriented toward aesthetic effect, which contradict conventional notions of Romantic painting as emotional expressive art, he made an original contribution to modern art. In Friedrich's major works, the break with the traditions of landscape painting from the Baroque and Classical periods is accomplished in revolutionary fashion. The thematic and motif canon of these images unites landscape and religion, preferring them to allegories of solitude, death, conceptions of the afterlife and hopes of redemption. Friedrich's melancholic worldview and self-understanding is seen as exemplary for the artistic image in the Romantic era. Through works with largely unknown pictorial contexts, the painter makes open-ended offerings that involve the viewer's emotional world in the interpretive process. The semantic openness of the images has led, since Friedrich's rediscovery at the beginning of the 20th century, to numerous often fundamentally different interpretations and theory formation from art historical, philosophical, literary, psychological and theological perspectives. No shipping outside the European Union or to French overseas territories.