1774 -1840 · sea, abbey, window and great landscapes of Berlin

The Alte Nationalgalerie preserves one of the deepest complexes in Friedrich, dominated by the famous counterpart of the Monk by the sea and the Abbey in an oak forest, to which windows, moons and mountains respond.

Caspar David Friedrich was born in 1774 in Greifswald, on the Baltic, and died in Dresden in 1840. His painting transformed experiences of walking, mourning, faith and political uncertainty into rigorously constructed landscapes. The Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin retains an essential whole for understanding this ambition. The Monk by the Sea, painted between 1808 and 1810, reduced almost everything to three bands: beach, dark sea and immense sky. The tiny figure does not introduce a story; it gives an infinite scale and exposes the fragility of the human gaze. Presented at the Berlin Academy exhibition in 1810, the painting is commented on by Heinrich von Kleist and purchased with it its counterpart by the King of Prussia Frederick William III. The Abbey in an oak forest shows a funeral procession entering a Gothic ruin. Bare oaks, tombs and distant light question death, faith and the continuity between human architecture and nature. Their association remains one of the most radical formulations of German romanticism. Other works in the museum move these questions inward. In Woman at the Window, Caroline Friedrich, seen from behind, looks at the masts and water from the Dresden workshop; the actual opening becomes an image of desire elsewhere. Watzmann assembles studies of different mountains in order to produce a visual ascent to an inaccessible summit. The moon scenes, the port of Greifswald and the morning landscapes extend this dialogue between proximity and distance. A faithful reproduction must preserve the thinness of the layers, the large almost empty fields, the precise silhouettes and the very subtle variations between gray, green, blue and ocher. The selection "Caspar David Friedrich at the Alte Nationalgalerie" notably compares The Monk by the Sea - Caspar David Friedrich and The Abbey in an Oak Forest - Caspar David Friedrich. His reading favors light.

In Berlin, Friedrich reduces the landscape to the point of making the sea, ruin or a simple window the measure of what human beings cannot fully know.