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| Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape | 
 enlarge | Author: Joseph Leo Koerner
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Category: Book
Buy New: $27.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  (1 reviews)
Sales Rank: 569836
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: Second Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
ISBN: 1861894392
Dewey Decimal Number: 709
EAN: 9781861894397
ASIN: 1861894392
Publication Date: March 15, 2009 (In 65 Days)
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Not yet published
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Product Description
Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), the greatest painter of the Romantic movement in Germany, was perhaps Europe's first truly modern artist. His melancholy landscapes, often peopled by lonely wanderers, represent experiments towards a radically subjective art, one in which, as Friedrich wrote, the painter depicts not 'what he sees before him, but what he sees within him'. Yet in their awesome power to capture the individuality of visible forms Friedrich's pictures also accept and express the irredeemable otherness of Nature. In this compelling and highly original book, winner of the 1992 Mitchell Prize for the History of Art, now made available in a compact pocket format, Joseph Leo Koerner analyses Friedrich's art as it emerges out of - and partly reorientates - a subjectivist aesthetic. Beautifully illustrated, "Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape" is the most comprehensive account ever published in English on this most fascinating of nineteenth-century masters.
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| Customer Reviews:
A Portrait of the Invisible September 3, 2001
30 out of 30 found this review helpful
Koerner has written a philosophical masterpiece in the form of an art book. Caspar David Friedrich is one of the most complex and thought-provoking of nineteenth-century artists, whose whose exploration of perception shows up in his most mundane paintings as well as his most grandiose.
Koerner shows us how even a painting of something as simple as a bushy thicket in the snow contains many subtle contradictions and complexities that baffle the eye as we examine it more closely. The apparent simplicity and underlying intensity of many of his works is similar to that of Edward Hopper, on whom he seems to have been a major influence (and this book bears comparison with Kranzfelder's "Hopper").
Friedrich specialized in painting the human figure seen from behind (rueckenfigur), and this ties in with sense of nostalgia that is a major component of his art. A really notable example of this is "Abbey Graveyard under Snow", a painting of a ruined mediaeval monastery with a spectral procession of monks from a bygone age; this painting was destroyed by bombing in 1945 and exists only in reproduction - a ghostly painting of ghosts.
Koerner's dense prose is heavy going, but well worth the effort because it contains so much; the author evidently has a thorough grounding in philosophy as well as a great sympathy for his subject.
The last chapter is entitled "deja vu", and this sums up one of the main feelings aroused by this art. The last sentence is worth quoting:
"And it arrests you on the Dresden heath, before the thicket in winter, when what you thought were just alders in the snow are fragments of your darkest history".
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