Caspar David Friedrich is among those great painters the appreciation of whom has ironically suffered through the overexposure of a handful of paintings that has led to a general neglect of a magnificent and largely overlooked body of work. The foremost representative of early German Romantic painting, Friedrich is thankfully receiving renewed attention at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the public can acquaint itself not only with such well known works as Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog and Two Men Contemplating the Moon, but lesser known works that are no less extraordinary.

Friedrich is a very accessible painter, which helps to explain the ease with which he has been appropriated and just as often dismissed as irrelevant or worse. The remedy to this unfortunate situation is twofold: one, to refocus our attention on works that have not been reproduced ad nauseam – to rediscover the artist through an entrance not overly trodden, and at the same time to see his work in the light of the philosophical ideas and theories that surrounded and influenced him, rather than through the worst depredations of early 20th century German politics that are unfairly traced back to the early German Romantics. A great artist or thinker can be appropriated for good or ill, he or she can be reinterpreted, misinterpreted, reconstructed or deconstructed. To hold them responsible for the crimes committed by those they could know nothing of – let alone anticipate – seems a distinctly unproductive and even irresponsible way of assessing their contributions to humanity.

There are marvelous surprises in store for those attending this retrospective with open and unjaded eyes: paintings of uncanny wonderment, suffused with a sense of the sublime, and expressing a philosophy of nature that has much to say about today if we care to listen.

It is nature, and our place in it that is the overarching theme of Friedrich’s work, that to which he tirelessly returns. It is rare to find philosophers such as GWF Hegel and Friedrich Schelling invoked in an art exhibition – but their names are deservedly mentioned in the........

© Blitz