The First Abstract Painting

Casper David Friedrich, The Monk By the Sea, 1810

"No situation in the world could be more sad and eerie than this—as the only spark of life in the wide realm of death, a lonely center in a lonely circle..." wrote an early admirer of this painting. "Since in its monotony and boundlessness it has no foreground except the frame, when viewing it, it is as if one's eyelids had been cut away."

The tiny figure of the monk (simultaneously a symbol of the spiritual inner life, a self-portrait of the artist, and a stand-in for the viewer) is dwarfed by three different kinds of voids, land, sea, and sky: the bare and pallid grassless foreground, the iron-black bar of the sea that shuts down the middle, and the amorphous expanse of vastness that is the sky which occupies the majority of the painting.

Without a repoussoir—a framing device that leads the viewer's gaze into the image - the emptiness of the foreground disrupts the viewer's relationship to the picture's space. One cannot mentally "penetrate" the image: Friedrich has created an unbridgeable gap between the monk and the viewer. The monk is cut off from us spatially and existentially, and there are no traditional landscape elements that might soften the effect. 

In June 1809, the wife of painter Gerhard von Kügelgen, an acquaintance of Friedrich, visited him and later wrote in a letter how shriveling she felt the loneliness of the setting to be, deploring the lack of consolation that a little more content - some sort of movement or narrative - might have brought to the painting's "unending space of air." If only she could have read Nietzsche or Sartre!

Critics have described The Monk By the Sea, painted between 1808 and 1810, as "perhaps the first 'abstract' painting in a very modern sense" because of its radical composition. Friedrich purposely left out the conventional devices that create depth. Friedrich wants the viewer to feel confronted by the question of mankind coming up against a vast and quite possibly "empty" universe. It's been compared to many other more or less abstract paintings, right up to Whistler and Courbet and, perhaps most significantly for our appreciation of a still often misunderstood artist of our own time, abstract expressionist Mark Rothko.

Gustav Courbet - The Beach at Palavas,1877

James MacNeil Whistler - Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville, 1865 

Mark Rothko - Light Earth and Blue, 1954.
Above Rothko: William Nicholson, Mending the Nets, c. 1910

Friedrich: The Tragedy of the Landscape

At the same time that Constable was painting the ever-changing skies over England (1820 or 1822 or so), German painter Casper David Friedrich was working on Moonrise Over the Sea (1822). It’s almost a “negative” of a Constable or Dutch coastal painting; it’s night, instead of day; it’s full of shadows, mystery, and gloom instead of clarity, light, and freshness; the figures aren’t minimal yardsticks for scale, they’re large, front and center, projecting well above the distant horizon, and therefore we understand that, instead of just being a “picturesque” window on the world, Moonrise Over the Sea is about the relationship of the figures to the landscape (and by analogy a comment on humanity’s place in existence).

In the terminology of the day, Constable is about the picturesque and Friedrich is about the sublime. These are the two sides of the coin of Romanticism, a word that describes the eruption into European art, literature, and music of emotion, imagination, spontaneity, psychology, madness, the supernatural - the subconscious, dreams, extreme states, altered states, the otherworldly, the unknown - everything, basically, that the tidy, Godly, rational, clockwork world of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment wanted to believe didn’t exist.

I’m reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for a lecture I’ll be giving next month on Romantic art, and I keep seeing images from Friedrich’s work as I read. Compare the following passage with Friedrich’s stunning Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818) (below).

"The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy wall of the glacier overhung me…. a scene terrifically desolate…. rising like the waves of a troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep. The field of ice is almost a league in width, but I spent nearly two hours in crossing it. The opposite mountain is a bare perpendicular rock…. and above it rose Mont Blanc, in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of the rock, gazing on this wonderful and stupendous scene. The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits hung over its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds."

Full of “a sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul,” reveling in the “solitary grandeur of the scene,” the haunted scientist utters a desperate (and mega-Romantic) creed, part death-wish, part prayer:

“Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life.”

In this painting, because the figure’s back is turned toward us, the viewer can occupy his place in the landscape. We understand that the scene we’re viewing is being filtered through human sensation.

But this is not the case in The Polar Sea, also known as The Wreck of Hope, (above). Here Friedrich omitted the figure and pushed the sublime indifference of nature about as far as the public could take at the time.

Look carefully: amidst the vast, forbidding desolation and merciless, impersonal natural forces of crushing glacial ice and stone, you can see the stern of a ship trapped in the ice being slowly crushed to pieces. A writer in Time Magazine in 1974 nailed exactly what’s going on in this painting: “"the image he produced, with its grinding slabs of travertine-colored floe ice chewing up a wooden ship, goes beyond documentary into allegory: the frail bark of human aspiration crushed by the world's immense and glacial indifference.” His work is still so powerful that many give him credit for inventing die romantische Stimmungslandschaf the landscape full of Romantic feeling and mysticism.

Friedrich’s paintings channel the same Romantic sublime - the presence of the awe-inspiring (“awful” = awe full) power and vastness of nature, in the face of which one feels “solemnized” as Shelley wrote, aware of one’s mortality jolted from one’s routine personal cares, which suddenly seem petty, insignificant, and small.

"Close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards." Friedrich in his collection of aphorisms (1830).

"Friedrich! … The only landscape painter so far to succeed in stirring up all the forces of my soul, the painter who has created a new genre: the tragedy of the landscape." - David d'Angers.

Constable: Head in the Clouds

Here is an oil sketch (painted as a study, thus not intended as a finished work) by the 18th/19th century English landscapist John Constable. It’s not a masterpiece of Western art, but it’s a lovely thing, and it’s a chance for us to consider what painting is all about in the first place.

Our last painter, Corot (“ka-ROH”), was among a group of artists who were the first to regularly go outside and pitch their easels in front of nature. Like Constable, they used the oil sketches they made outdoors to paint larger works in the studio, and it wasn’t until the impressionists who followed them a little later in the nineteenth century (just when an abundance of synthetic pre-mixed colors was becoming available in portable tubes) that oil paintings executed on the spot were valued and exhibited as finished paintings in their own right.

The earlier Old Master painters usually minimized their personal presence in the work by erasing their brushstrokes and finishing their paintings with a seamless, sometimes enamel-like surface. For these traditional landscape artists, it was important to be more classical and fanciful than realistic. They often incorporated highly structured compositions, clearly defined details, and “grand” and elevating subject matter referring to stories from Greek and Roman mythology or the Bible.

All that changed with the Barbizon painters and the Impressionists who followed them. Impressionists like Monet, Renoir, and Sisely applied to the festive, modern life of Paris Barbizon’s spontaneity and fidelity to nature, its rapid, rough-and-ready brushstrokes, and its embrace of "everyday” subject matter. But some definite first steps in this direction were taken by our Englishman.

At the same time that Corot was making oil sketches en plein air (in the outdoors) in the French Barbizon countryside, English painter John Constable (1776-1837) was doing the same thing in England, but it wasn’t only the momentary effects of light on water or wind in the trees he was after (though he loved everything rural, from weathered brickwork to old rotten posts). What really mattered to Constable was the clouds.

Constable so loved the clouds that he executed dozens (if not hundreds?) of these meticulously observed and accurately rendered cloud studies. The finished landscapes his clouds adorned forever changed the course of art, but because the sketches are so fresh, so full of varied light, texture, and motion, not to mention so freely painted, they hold for us moderns a special charm. Constable devoured the work of pioneering meteorologist Luke Howard, the first to classify the various types of clouds, and his cloud paintings today would sell for tens (and possibly hundreds) of thousands of dollars. Per the usual cliches, Constable's parents opposed his career choice, the public didn't buy his pictures, and the artist remained a pauper all his life, however professedly happily so (he turned down a chance to promote his work in France saying he’d rather remain “a poor man [in England] than a rich man abroad”).

But hey, who wouldn’t be happy spending a life painting clouds!?

Paintings, then, are supposed to “ennoble our sensibilities” (Old Master), quicken our sense of the true (Barbizon), ground us in the beauty of the simple (Constable), awaken us to the life and color of the ordinary (Impressionism) …. So what’s the purpose of painting? What a silly question!

We'll surely revisit Constable's sketches and his famous finished paintings again. There's a great Web exhibit on the Australian National Gallery's Website, which is where I found the images and some of the information for this post.

Oh, and did you know there is an official "Cloud Appreciation Society" that you can join? Check out their fun (if you read it carefully) website for some really awesome images.