His gloomy, gorgeous paintings have been described as so powerful that they have tempted viewers to oblivion – but many were lost or destroyed. Next year, a major exhibition will gather some 75 together
One morning in 1810, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe climbed the stairs to a modest apartment at no. 27 An Der Elbe in Dresden. Continental Europe’s greatest poet was returning from taking a cure in the spa town of Teplice, so probably needed cheering up. His diary entry is brief: “Went to Friedrich’s. His wondrous landscapes. A foggy churchyard; an open sea.”
The paintings were Monk By the Sea and Abbey Among Oak Trees, both by Caspar David Friedrich, who died in 1840 aged 65. The former, a kind of existentially deranging prefiguring of Munch’s The Scream , is 98% ominous cloudscape, beach and sky – plus a tiny brush stroke of monk with his back to us. It’s been called the big bang of Romantic art and also, tiny human figure notwithstanding, the birth of abstraction a century before Wassily Kandinsky ostensibly showed that art needn’t be representational.
The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time by Florian Illies is published by Polity, £20. Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature is at the Met, New York, 8 February to 11 May.
