Florian Illies' The Magic of Silence (Caspar David Friedrich)

"You can dream about his works, but you can't understand them clearly because they are indefinite, even in his own soul...He says himself he can explain neither the idea nor the picture that expresses it."

-Alexander Turgenev

 

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was a German Romantic landscape painter. Illies' book, which came out in German in 2023 and last year in an English translation by Tony Crawford, is about Friedrich's life, but also about the history and reception of his paintings after his death. Friedrich had fallen into obscurity when he died in Dresden, and it wasn't until 1900, when a Norwegian art historian interested in a friend of Friedrich's came across some paintings and made Friedrich his cause.

Illies' style in the book is anecdotal and impressionistic. Looking at a Friedrich painting in Dresden gave Samuel Beckett the idea for Waiting for Godot. Goethe awarded Friedrich the Weimar art prize in 1805, but later said that Friedrich was taking art in the wrong direction.

Both the Nazis and the East German Communists thought Friedrich was one of theirs; they may both have been wrong... In the late 1930s, a Jewish art dealer came to a Berlin museum and said I have a painting of Friedrich's that I want to sell. The museum agreed to buy it, at a fair value, but it didn't have enough money in its acquisitions budget, so it appealed to Hitler to cough up. Which he did. And which enabled the art dealer to get his family out of Germany in time.

A couple of years ago I read Illies' 1913. It works the same way: an anecdotal style that jumps around, but still it suggests a larger picture. It's not straightforward history, but it works and makes good reading. While I'd known of Friedrich before, I got to know him better when I saw several of his paintings in Germany last fall.

One of  the paintings I saw in Berlin at the Schloss Charlottenburg:

The Cross on the Baltic

Covering Germany for my European Reading Challenge.