Art Club 2024
250 years of Caspar David Friedrich
Caspar David Friedrich (1774 -1840) was a German painter, among the greatest exponents of the Romanticism movement. After starting to paint in Greifswald, his hometown, he moved to Dresden, where he continued his career. His artistic production introduced important innovations, revolutionizing the genre of traditional landscape and influencing the style of artists in the years following his death.
The absolute protagonist of most of Friedrich's paintings is the landscape, a favorite subject from the beginning of his career.
His paintings portray German landscapes imbued with intense light and bearers of a subjective vision. His passion for nature - considered as a cosmic unity - was so strong that it led him to create, in 1807, The Cross in the Mountains, a work where for the first time in the history of art the traditional scene of the Crucifixion was inserted into a context natural, causing a heated debate among critics. The introduction of human figures within landscape scenes allowed the German painter to combine technique with the representation of the typical themes of romanticism: the sublime, the infinite, solitude and the relationship between man and nature.
Friedrich's style is characterized by the presence of symmetries and contrasts between vertical and horizontal elements and so-called photographic cuts, which show an alternation of visions from afar and closer focuses on spatially delimited glimpses. In both cases, the representation of meteorological phenomena highlights atmospheres that arouse specific emotions in the viewer's gaze. The emotional intensity is therefore not obtained from the representation of the faces of the characters, usually portrayed from behind - this is the case, for example, of the famous Wanderer on the Sea of Fog and Monk by the Sea - but rather from the natural elements, which symbolize the great romantic themes. The intense light and the use of a palette composed mainly of soft colors contribute to arousing a sense of emptiness, mystery and solitude surrounded by a religiosity that derives from the divine presence in the landscape. The final years of the painter's life, marked by a professional decline and worsening health conditions, did not hinder him in producing works and, above all, in becoming one of the most revolutionary painters in the history of art.
Eye's open for the Art Club 2024
that celebrates Caspar David Friedrich.
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