Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature

Alison Hokanson , Joanna Sheers Seidenstein

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Feb 3, 2025 - Art - 296 pages

A richly illustrated volume surveying the career of Caspar David Friedrich, the German landscape painter whose emotionally profound visions of nature are among the most iconic works of Romantic art



The paintings and drawings of the nineteenth-century German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) brilliantly illuminate our experience of the natural world. This generously illustrated volume explores how Friedrich, who created some of the most indelible images of Romantic art, deployed signature motifs--moonlit skies, Gothic ruins, isolated figures, and misty panoramas--together with innovative compositional strategies to create paintings and drawings that are metaphorically rich and emotionally profound. Friedrich worked at the dawn of a new understanding in Europe of the human relationship with the nature, as German artists and intellectuals elevated the exploration of nature into a journey of self-discovery, yielding insights into spirituality, mortality, identity, and history. Essays by leading scholars examine Friedrich's career, considering how he created a new and open-ended pictorial language to express the Romantic vision of nature. Placing his works in cultural and historic context, the authors evaluate his status as an icon of German Romanticism and as a touchstone for visual culture in the United States, while also exploring his working methods and the complex themes that underpinned his art.



Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press



Exhibition Schedule:



The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

(February 8-May 11, 2025)

Contents

• Directors Foreword 6 Acknowledgments: 9
• FRIEDRICH AND THE SOUL OF NATURE: 15
• MOMENT MEMORY MONUMENT: 47
• MATERIAL MATTERS: 65
• FRIEDRICH IN THE UNITED STATES: 79
• FROM IMAGE TO ICON: 95
• Bibliography 277 Index 289 Photography Credits: 295

About the author

Alison Hokanson is a specialist in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Central and Northern European and British painting. She joined the department in 2012 and has curated and co-curated special installations and exhibitions at The Met on J. M. W. Turner, Victorian painting, Pre-Raphaelite art and design, and Rodin. She has published on a wide range of topics including nineteenth-century French drawings, Belgian Symbolism and the landscapes of Vincent van Gogh. She received her BA in art history from Brown University and MA and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Joanna Sheers Seidenstein is responsible for Northern European drawings and prints. Until recently, she was the Stanley H. Durwood Curatorial Fellow in the Division of European and American Art at the Harvard Art Museums, in which role she co-organized the 2021 public program Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures and co-curated the 2022 exhibition Crossroads: Drawing the Dutch Landscape. Prior to this, she held an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship here in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Met and an Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellowship at The Frick Collection. She was the curator of the 2017 Frick exhibition Divine Encounter: Rembrandt’s Abraham and the Angels. She holds a BA from Vassar College and a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.

Joseph Leo Koerner is the Victor S. Thomas Professor and Chair of History of Art and Architecture as well as a professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in Cambridge.

Cordula Grewe is a professor of rt History at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature
• Authors: Alison Hokanson , Joanna Sheers Seidenstein
• Contributors: Joseph Leo Koerner, Cordula Grewe
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2025
• ISBN: 1588397890, 9781588397898
• Length: 296 pages
• Subjects: Art / Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions / General; Art / European; Art / Subjects & Themes / Landscapes & Seascapes; Art / Techniques / Drawing