Exhibition in Weimar about Goethe’s relationship to Caspar David Friedrich

He discovered it and promoted it, he admired it and was frightened by it. He even complained about him in conversations with third parties. A small, weighty essay can be deciphered as an unaddressed, lovingly admonishing letter to him: Goethe’s reactions to Caspar David Friedrich’s art are so ambivalent that they promise more insights than the emotional enthusiasm that made this anniversary year of Friedrich’s 250th birthday a mass success has.

Goethe and his dry art advisor Meyer immediately recognized the status when Friedrich submitted two sepia sheets to the Weimar competition in 1805. Actually, they were out of competition because Friedrich showed vast landscapes with huge, empty skies, not the mythological material required. And yet he received one of the awards and the papers were purchased. Until 1810, Goethe only saw such “cuttlefish,” but Friedrich’s outstanding talent was still clear.

Schopenhauer’s mother was horrified: “What a picture of death this landscape is!”

In 1810 Goethe visited him in his Dresden studio and wrote: “To Friedrich. Its wonderful landscapes. A foggy churchyard, an open sea.” These are the most famous Friedrich pictures to date, later acquired for Berlin, the “Monk by the Sea” and the “Abbey in the Eichwald”. “Wonderful”: the language used back then was less unspecific than it is today; it still has the connotation of the magical, of sorcery. And so it shows the doubt, the alienation: This art exceeds human dimensions, the winter abbey has nothing of the joie de vivre of Dutch winter pictures with their sleighs and ice skaters, Goethe complained in a conversation with the sculptor and illustrator Schadow. “Here is cold, hassle, dying and desolation.”

The fact that this was not an isolated opinion is shown by a clever review written by Johanna Schopenhauer (the mother of the philosopher and Adele, known from Thomas Mann) for the Weimarer Journal of Luxury and Fashion put it: “What a picture of death this landscape is! How horrible, how hopelessly empty without the eternal star of love twinkling above.”

A painting of death in the heart of Weimar Classicism: That is the range, the problem that explains the exhibition with which the Weimar Classical Foundation ends the Friedrich Year. A “wonderful”, intelligent, thoughtful presentation of the entire Friedrich collection built up in Goethe’s era, as far as it has been preserved: the sheets he himself acquired, the pictures of the Duke and his wife, and the collectors and artists in the area, including documentation discourses held about the images. The fact that you can not only look, but also read and think for yourself is shown in an accompanying booklet with references to sources outside of the absolutely praiseworthy catalogue.

You can also read poems and drama passages that Friedrich referred to, by Schiller and Goethe. The sending of his works to Weimar in 1805 was also a tribute to his own literary foundations: it expressed gratitude for its impact. The painter had no way of knowing how close Goethe’s drawing in the early Weimar period was to Friedrich’s later pictorial inventions, but visitors to the exhibition can experience it. The chunk in the sea of ​​fog, moons on blue paper over breathy vegetation, steaming fog in Ilmenau forests: these Goethe sheets appear just as stripy, borderless, so that you could turn them upside down and look at them upside down, as Goethe did in another outburst of anger over Friedrich’s pictures.

This somewhat satirical criticism (if it was correctly noted by Sulpiz Boisserée) aptly approaches the abstraction that already lurks behind Friedrich’s inventions, for example in the striking, almost geometric symmetries that his landscapes show. Added to this is the religious, allegorical, mystical nature of Friedrich’s symbolic worlds. That alone might not have bothered Goethe and his adlatus Meyer. What was disturbing was that the people in these pictures always look like lost people, lonely in an oversized, empty universe.

Goethe railed against the “German-religious-Christian” tendency of the new romantic art

The debating astonishment did not prevent Friedrich from being purchased in Weimar, five paintings alone in 1810 by Duke Carl August himself, after Duchess Louise had already purchased a monumental drawing “Chicken Grave by the Sea” for her private rooms in 1808. The catalog suggests that the ducal couple appreciated the patriotic-political subtexts, their anti-French messages, the German-Christian theme. Against this tendency, the “German-religious-Christian” of the new romantic art, Goethe and Meyer sounded harsh words in 1817, aesthetically conservative, politically clairvoyant.

On “Hutten’s Grave”, which may have come to Weimar around 1826, Friedrich placed the names of contemporary authors such as Arndt, Jahn, Görres, that of Freiherr vom Stein and two supporters of the Greek liberation struggles named Krug and Tzirschner, who are now only available for the Weimar exhibition were made legible again: a program of the new, ethnic nationalism that was repugnant to Goethe.

In view of such finds, it is a shame – and the only criticism of this exhibition – that Goethe’s essay “Ruysdael as a Poet” was not included. Here, as Ernst Osterkamp has shown, Goethe designed an anti-Friedrich aesthetic based on three paintings that were already hanging in Dresden at that time, and in a certain negation because he selected works by the Dutchman that were thematically close to Friedrich’s interests: cemetery, Ruins, nature on the edge of civilization. But Ruysdael (as Goethe wrote him) designed narrative continua of nature and human work. It is obvious that in Weimar they did not want to compete with the Dresden Friedrich Show and relied on their own holdings – that is why we can still recommend Goethe’s five-page essay and Osterkamp’s commentary on it to every visitor.

But much more is now being shown in Weimar: the romantic environment to which Goethe also reacted, Runge’s times of day, the small pictures by Carus, the overwhelmingly beautiful, intimate back views of Kersting. The female-dominated “network” between Weimar and Dresden Romanticism becomes visible. In addition, there is Goethe’s own influence on the art of his era through the illustrations for his works. Outside Germany, Goethe is considered a romantic, and in the many illustrations from Delacroix to Schwind you can see why.

A highlight awaits in a technical and conservation department: There it is shown how, with the help of artificial intelligence, an image that may have been cut off at the bottom, the “mountain range with moon”, could be supplemented from the corpus of Friedrich’s preserved landscapes. Possibly the most beautiful picture in the Weimar collection, the one closest to Goethe, the “Rügen Landscape with Rainbow” can only be shown with a placeholder because it was probably stolen by American soldiers in 1945 – it may still exist somewhere.

This wonderful image reacts to Goethe’s poem “Schäfer’s Lamentation”, a long sigh of sadness in song-like rhymes, which shows again: If Goethe showed reserves, it was because he knew what Friedrich’s images that disturbed him were talking about.

Caspar David Friedrich. Goethe and Romanticism in Weimar. Schiller Museum Weimar, until March 2nd.