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Caspar David Friedrich in His Element

(22.4.2023) According to Carl Gustav Carus the element of painter Caspar David Friedrich was twilight. In other words: in twilight, at twilight, Caspar David Friedrich was in his element; and Carus, who was also a painter, was not referring to works by Friedrich, but to actual walks Friedrich used to embark on, in the early hour of the day, at dawn and alone so, on solitary walks, or in the evening, at the time of sunset or after sunset, and then often accompanied by a friend (we may think here of Carus himself). Friedrich is indirectly confirming that he had been used to do walks in the evening, by stating, after his marriage in 1818, that he was staying home now rather in the evening than to go out. – Caspar David Friedrich scholarship is controversial, and we may avoid to enter controversy directly – by just embarking on a walk with Friedrich. A walk at dusk. And by asking him, occasionally (and in a friendly manner), about the blue hour more specifically. Since this is about the blue hour in Caspar David Friedrich. Which, however, cannot be thought without exploring the twilights of the Romantic Movement, with Friedrich as our Cicerone.

1) Prologue: A Blue Hour in Sartre

What we are doing here is actually not only a contribution to the history of light, of art and so on, but also to the history of mentalities. And the first law of such history goes: it is not that easy to go back in time. Not because people were different per se, people were good and bad, they walked and talked and so on, but because mentalities of people were different. And to understand mentalities is actually required to understand people of the past, and especially artists (in case we seek to understand them). Non-historians and also quite a few historians, and also quite many art historians do tend to underestimate this difficulty to go back in time. Caspar David Friedrich was not a man of our age. His mentality, apart from being an outstanding artist, was not that of a 21st century man. But how about Sartre? And why Sartre? Because there is a blue hour in Sartre. And before we might go back roughly 200 years in time, we might go back roughly 100 years first, to meet with Sartre, and to prepare for the phenomenological, and also for the existential experience with Friedrich.
Sartre had wanted to include a brief blue hour scenery in his 1938 novel La nausée, but the passage got cut. His protagonist, the historian Roquentin, is bored, and generally sensing a lack of meaning in his life, without having diagnosed that lack of meaningful relation to things and to life, and specifically also to his work as a historian yet. He is sitting there in the blue light of evening, a light which is falling on the table (any philosopher is expecting a lesson in phenomenology to come, with the table, and the mind of a beholder perceiving the table as the example), but Roquentin is simply turning on the light. We might think of a lamp, assuming that we are in the era of electric light, and indeed instantly, the blue windows are almost turning black, due to the artificial light of a lamp. And for Roquentin, who is feeling more relaxed now, thus night has come, and he senses that he might now be able to write, feeling more peaceful movements in himself.

With this passage we might meet Sartre the phenomenologist, as well as we might meet Sartre the existentialist. Meaning in life is not guaranteed (by religion) anymore, the existentialist might say: you have to find it for yourself, with being the architect of your own meaningful life, and by finding meaningful – and above all: passionate – relations to things and to people. A phenomenological stance might help (to diagnose a lack of meaning), but a phenomenological stance might generally be an interesting perspective. Because this stance makes a difference between how things are, without us being there to perceive them, and how things appear in our mind (intentionally focussing on these things). A phenomenological stance focusses on the ways our conscience is building/shaping/constructing the relations with things. And this thing, this object can also be a blue hour.

All this might prepare us to meet with Caspar David Friedrich. Because we might ask now: did Friedrich feel metaphysically homeless as 21st century philosophers might describe 21st century man? Or was he at ease with a Lutheran faith, and in peaceful relation with things and with life? Or was he yet at ease with his faith, yet still, occasionally, experiencing fears and pains (but not a general metaphysical homelessness as more modern man might feel)?
And how about his way of perceiving twilight (or a blue hour)? Was Caspar David Friedrich perhaps a phenomenologist avant la lettre, interested in the physical nature of things on the one hand, but also interested in the ways an artist, the conscience of an artist, could perceive and artifically create atmospheres in painting (which is somewhat more than re-creating an atmosphere in a visual representation). Which perhaps might have required that Friedrich also made a difference between a naive, daily-life perception, and a more reflected one that also reflected on the ways his own perception and conscience worked? A self-reflective conscience as one might say?

All these question would have been my questions if I had had the chance to embark on a walk at dusk with Caspar David Friedrich.

2) A Walk At Dusk

A Walk at Dusk is the title given to a painting by Friedrich (shown above), a painting which is now in the Getty museum, and which is a painting that was included into the oeuvre of Caspar David Friedrich only in the 20th century. If the title goes back to Friedrich, I don’t know, other titles seem possible, and, as many paintings by Friedrich, it seems to be a picture that looks at someone contemplating something (a grave).
I would not have asked Friedrich immediately, on our walk, how he felt about interpretation, knowing already that he made a difference between people seeing the possibility of consolation in the representation of a cross, while other people just saw a cross. Personally I think that Friedrich showed the things and subjects in his paintings that moved him emotionally and stimulated him to think, giving also viewers the possibility to think and to respond emotionally. Which does not say that we have to feel the same as Friedrich or to think exactly the same. But it seems meaningful to me, to have an idea what a painting by Friedrich is about (or was about, in his view, for him), and to embark on being a producer of meaning by myself, respecting the parameters set by Friedrich. And knowing that also for him, some parameters were set, by the culture of his time.
As a non-specialist I do not know if Friedrich was a reader of Hölderlin. But in the Hyperion by Hölderlin, as well as in the Hyperion fragment (which was published seperately) twilight appears as something rather noble, and soothing, as an element in which the protagonist feels at ease, an element which, in the frame of the poetical prose, works in contrast to blinding sunlight. And it seems to be the undefined, ambiguous character of twilight which might have this effect, while sunlight is rather to be identified with brutal truth.
I don’t know either if Friedrich was a reader of Eichendorff (and if Friedrich was a great reader at all, but he did write poems himself), Eichendorff, whose famous poem Zwielicht might be seen as setting a completely different tone: in Zwielicht twilight appears as an element in which love and friendship seem to be endangered. And the atmosphere is just the opposite of being soothing, but rather unsettling.

It does not seem to me that Friedrich was interested in the unsettling per se, but certainly he was interested in (or responded to) the sublime nature of time itself: the rhythm of day and night, the cycle of the seasons, beginning and end, mortality, but he was not only someone musing about beginning and end (and the unsettling in the subject of time), but also a rather professional observer. Which can be simply deduced from the fact that Friedrich not only represented atmospheres, but also constructed unseen visionary views, such as visions of the church, but also of a temple (see below), although he never had studied the light on location in Sicily, nor been in the South at all. One might think that he constructed atmospheres, as an artist, drawing on the repertoire of his own observations, and this repertoire he might have found or built on his walks.

I am assuming that Friedrich might also have observed the blue hour, but the blue hour in itself was not a subject for Caspar David Friedrich. It is interesting to compare his oeuvre, in that respect, with the oeuvre of Mariupol-born landscape painter Arkhip Kuindzhi (see the examples given below, in the index), because Kuindzhi is occasionally very similar to Friedrich, but definitely stresses the blue hour more in his representations of twilight. While in Friedrich the color blue does appear, but rather in the context of more complex settings. And the cultural parameters of the German Romantic Movement might have made it rather impossible to prioritize the blue, since blue was already given a decided symbolical meaning (as the element indicating longing for something beautiful, but distant), which would have defined also a painting by Friedrich too obviously, even if he had not wanted it to be defined in such way. The blue hour, brief, is present in Caspar David Friedrich, but not as a subject, or as an entity in itself, but rather as an element within the rhythm of time passing, cyclically, and it seems to me that, in the frame of twilight, Friedrich was rather interested in the moment of moonrising, than in the element of blue in itself, within a twilight. With the result that paintings by Friedrich have a different tonality, although the symbolical meaning of the hour of inbetween, as the stage before immediately entering something (such as night, or a cemetary, is very present in Friedrich; see the unfinished painting of the entry to a cemetary at dusk).

3) The Cultural Parameters of Daily Life

It is also important to realize that the imagery of Caspar David Friedrich is a pre-electric light imagery, and also a pre-gaslight imagery. Artificial light (in terms of candlelight) does appear, but rarely so. And according to Carus, Friedrich worked in a shadowy room (which one might imagine lacking any source of artificial light), musing constantly on his creations. For 21st centry humans the imagery of Friedrich is actually that of a complete blackout; and perhaps, to understand Friedrich, it might be necessary to know how life is without electric light, and how the natural cycle of day and light and of the seasons does affect the mentality of humans. And especially of how sun and moon might affect the mentality of people, under such conditions.

(Picture: Gernek)

It is interesting to know in that respect that Caspar David Friedrich had married the daughter of a so-called Blaufärber, which is a profession that specialized in the production of white patterns on a blue ground on textiles, patterns that can look like stars in the night. Another cultural parameter perhaps to know of, and a parameter that might save us from perceiving the Romantic Movement as something only detached from daily life, and to help us perceiving it, althought it was longing for the absent distant beauty and constantly envisioned harmony, also as something embedded in daily life, a daily life not without its beauties.