Lives of Caspar David Friedrich (Lives of the Artists) [9781843682547]

Overview

These reminiscences of Caspar David Friedrich by fellow romantic painters and poets give a fascinating picture of the impact of his art on his contemporaries.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), one of the great visionaries of European art, spent all his life in Northern Germany, apart from four years studying in Copenhagen, and his output appears to consist almost entirely of German landscapes. But far from being parochial, he was, in the words of the French sculptor David d’Angers, the artist who ‘discovered the tragic in landscape’. His paintings assemble minutely observed elements of nature into compo­sitions that celebrate the riches and the melancholy of a cosmos fully imbued with the divine, while never losing an almost hallucinatory engagement with reality. For all their clarity, they are the quintessence of Romanticism.

Almost too familiar today, to Friedrich’s contemporaries these extraordinary paint­ings were astonishing and challenging. This volume records the reactions of some of the most prominent figures of German Romanticism: Kleist, Brentano and Arnim (in a witty series of dialogues between gallery visitors alternately bewitched and bewildered by Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea), the painter and physiologist Carus, the psychologist Schubert, the Russian poet and translator Zhukovsky. A piece by Goethe and his colleague Heinrich Meyer records the somewhat baffled admiration of the earlier generation; and Friedrich’s own Commandments of Art breathes the almost overwhelming passion with which he approached his vocation. An introduction by the leading scholar Johannes Grave situates Friedrich’s art and its reception in the context of the Romantic movement both in Germany and in Europe as a whole.

The book, Lives of Caspar David Friedrich (Lives of the Artists) [Bulk, Wholesale, Quantity] ISBN#9781843682547 in Paperback by J. W. Goethe, Carl Gustav Carus, Clemens Brentano, Caspar David Friedrich, Heinrich Meyer, Heinrich Kleist, Vasily Andreyevich Zhukowski, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, Achim Arnim may be ordered in bulk quantities. Minimum starts at 25 copies. Availability based on publisher status and quantity being ordered.