Friedrich: Invention of Romanticism

Description

FRIEDRICH, Caspar David (illustrator) and Hubertus GASSNER (editor). Caspar David Friedrich: die Erfindung der Romantik; exhibition catalogue [Museo Folkwang, Essen, May 5 – August 20, 2006, Hamburger Kunsthalle, October 7, 2006 – January 28, 2007]. Museo Folkwang Essen; Hamburger Kunsthalle Hamburg: Hirmer, 2006. 383 pages: numerous illustrations, folio format, hardcover binding. Condition: Excellent. Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was a German painter, draftsman and artist. Today he is regarded as one of the most significant artists of German Early Romanticism. Through his impact-oriented, constructed pictorial inventions that contradict conventional notions of Romantic painting as emotional expressionist 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 Classicism is accomplished in revolutionary fashion. The thematic and motific canon of these images combines landscape and religion primarily into allegories of solitude, death, conceptions of the afterlife and hopes of redemption. Friedrich's world and self-understanding, characterized by melancholy, is seen as exemplary for the artist's image in the Romantic era. Through his works, the painter offers open-ended meanings with largely unfamiliar pictorial contexts, engaging the viewer's emotional world in the interpretive process. The open-endedness of the images has led, since Friedrich's rediscovery at the beginning of the 20th century, to numerous often fundamentally different interpretations and theoretical developments from art-historical, philosophical, literary, psychological and theological perspectives.