German Romantic Master: Friedrich's Revolutionary Art

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, 4°, hardcover. Excellent condition. Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was a German painter, draughtsman and artist, today regarded as one of the most significant artists of German early Romanticism. Through his effect-oriented constructed pictorial inventions, which contradict conventional notions of Romantic painting as emotional expressive art, he made an original contribution to modern art. In Friedrich's major works, a revolutionary break with the traditions of landscape painting from Baroque and Classicism is accomplished. The thematic and motif canon of these images combines landscape and religion preferably as allegories of solitude, death, afterlife conceptions and hopes of redemption. Friedrich's melancholy-marked worldview and self-understanding is seen as exemplary for the artist's image in the Romantic era. The painter's works, with largely unfamiliar image contexts, offer open-ended meanings that involve the viewer's emotional world in the process of interpretation. 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 theoretical developments from art-historical, philosophical, literary, psychological or theological perspectives. Restricted shipping: European Union and French overseas territories only.