By Alex Greenberger. Senior Editor, ARTnews. His landscapes—populated often by just one or a few figures, and many featuring radiant suns, craggy mountains, and foreboding seas—summon an outpouring of emotion as they divine metaphors for birth, death, and spiritual rebirth in nature. Is she greeting the day or bidding it goodbye? The titular shift alters the meaning of this painting. With the Folkwang name, you might assume the painting were about someone closing out their moment in the sun—a parallel, perhaps, for moving a step nearer to expiration.
But with the Met one, it suddenly seems as though the painting were about something else altogether: an in-between state in which life and death exist side by side. And they offer his pictures of people admiring forests and clearings as implicitly political subject matter, with much to say about Germany at a time when its nationhood was subject to debate. We Americans are late to the party, a tardiness partly attributable to the fact that there are just five Friedrich paintings held by museums in this country.
It is therefore expensive, cumbersome, and difficult to assemble the finest Friedrichs in the US, and that may be why, when the Met has attempted similar shows in the past—this is the third Friedrich show at the museum in the past half-century—they were always much smaller. Thank goodness the Met has finally mounted the large-scale show Friedrich has long deserved here. The museum has organized a well-rounded blockbuster, with dozens of drawings and prints to round out all the paintings on view.
In the years beforehand, Friedrich studied art, both at a local university in Greifswald, the Baltic city where he was born in , and at an academy in Copenhagen. At both schools, he was taught to focus on the human figure, as was common for artists of his era. But when looking at these initial works on paper, it quickly becomes apparent that Friedrich had plans to diverge from convention.
Take a work like Rock Arch in the Uttewalder Grund ca. The eye is drawn not to these people, one of whom throws up their arms in awe, but to the massive rocks on either side, which Friedrich has emphasized by piling up layers of watered-down brown ink.
