Mystical Schtick
“Wanderer in a Sea of Fog,” 1818, is Caspar David Friedrich’s most famous painting. This evokes how I feel when I look out the window of my apartment in Hoboken. All images on this page except the last one are from Wikipedia.
HOBOKEN, MAY 3, 2025. Alternate headlines for this column: “My Snarky Review of a Romantic German Painter.” “Greeting Card Spirituality: The Art of Caspar David Friedrich.” “Nazis Liked This Artist. Should We?”
These are inspired by “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature,” a show I just saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met calls Friedrich, 1774-1840, “the most significant German Romantic painter”; his landscapes “articulate a profound connection between the natural world and the inner self, or soul.”
My initial reaction: Ho hum, sublime schmaltz. But I found myself brooding over Friedrich, he got under my skin. Eventually I thought, Can’t waste this cogitation, gotta squeeze a column out of it. So here goes:
I’ll begin with a conjecture, or confession: The more we scrutinize art, the more we’re searching for our own reflection. We’re asking ourselves: How am I like or unlike this fellow seeker?
I’ve been sketching dumpsters, ladders and other simple things for less than two years, and I have the gall to see Friedrich as a fellow artist. I gaze at alleged masterpieces hanging in the Met and wonder, Hmm, could I do this?
Answer: Hell no. I don’t have Friedrich’s patience, let alone skill. Studying his murky panoramas I murmur to myself: Wow, look at how painstakingly he renders this moon-silvered wave. That curlicue of cloud. The mossy stones of a ruin. Each teeny needle on this spruce. Jesus, that must have taken forever.
But that’s just technique. I envy Friedrich’s talent for evoking mystical melancholy, a feeling I call gladsadness. He depicts the divine light beaming through trees and clouds while acknowledging, you know, the bad stuff. The woods are lovely, dark and deep and—oh shit, we’re all doomed!
But even geniuses can suffer from overexposure. I love Dickinson and Borges, but read too many poems or stories at one sitting and you spot the mannerisms, redundancies, tricks. The schtick. Another cute backyard critter, another labyrinth. Yada yada.
“Cross in the Mountains” was supposedly daring when Friedrich painted it in 1808.
As I trudge from one Friedrich to another, my admiration curdles. Oh God, not another cross among the crags. Friedrich’s superposition of Christ and wilderness, the Met assures us, was revolutionary in the early 19th century. But the crosses make my lapsed-Catholic eyes roll. An aphorism pops into my head: The avant garde becomes a greeting card.
The Met says Friedrich’s art-buying contemporaries dug the cross paintings (so how avant garde were they, really?). Ah, so that’s why he churned out Christian kitsch, the poor schmuck had to make a buck. Again, I relate.
Friedrich, in a portrait by another artist (below), looks tormented, a bit mad, in a clichéd Young Werther way. His melancholy was surely genuine. His mom died when he was seven, and when he was 13 Caspar watched his little brother fall through ice and drown. He suffered bouts of depression throughout his life, according to Wikipedia.
Portrait of Friedrich by Gerhard von Kugelgen. I’m guessing this guy wasn’t fun at parties.
But must he be so earnestly death-obsessed? Life isn’t all Sturm und Drang, it’s funny sometimes. I yearned to spot a bear pooping, or a shepherd, mouth agape, passed out by a wineskin, at the foot of one of Friedrich’s overbearing peaks.
Wikipedia says Friedrich’s paintings “display a new sense of levity” after he got married in 1818. He was 43, she 25. Several years later Friedrich produced the painting below, which sadly is not included in the Met’s show.
What do you see when you look at this painting?
The painting is titled Rocky Landscape in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, but it could be called My Wife Makes Me Rock Hard. Did Friedrich intend the joke? I doubt it. This painting, like all his paintings, seems deadly earnest. But I like to think this melancholic mystic, between bouts of depression, had a taste of carnal joy.
Friedrich’s best-known work, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (top of the page), shows a man gazing heroically over, um, a sea of fog. Oh, the self-importance. I’m not surprised Nazis (according to Wikipedia) dug Friedrich. Nazis saw themselves as heroic, and their malignant pomposity was untempered by irony.
Friedrich’s later works are almost parodically morbid. One shows the entrance to a cemetery, another a vulture hunched over an open grave. These works, the Met solemnly informs us, reveal Friedrich’s preoccupation with death. Ya think?
Before visiting the Met, I spent the morning driving through a brutally utilitarian chunk of northern Jersey. Contemplating Friedrich later I muse, Let’s see this German romantic find the sacred in a Hackensack mall.
I prefer mysticism with an ironic twist. The comic artist Robert Crumb comes to mind. I own the classic 1969 Crumb comic Plunge into the Depths of Despair. It’s dark, it rubs your face in the absurdity and horror of existence.
Crumb is a melancholic mystic, but he’s funny.
Like Friedrich, Crumb has mannerisms, tricks, but his profane, self-lacerating humor keeps him from devolving into schtick. And his style implies: Face it, all art is a cartoon, verisimilitude is a fool’s game.
One panel of Despair shows a naked schlub meditating among trees, an empty thought balloon above his head. Buddha, perhaps? Crumb’s caption says, “The best answer anyone has come up with for all our problems is just to sit and do nothing.”
My heart breaks for poor Caspar David Friedrich. Lacking irony, I couldn’t handle this world. I’m gonna spend the rest of this morning re-reading Plunge into the Depths of Despair. Crumb drew it more than a half century ago, but like all great art it’s apt as ever, and it makes me smile.
Postscript: For a more positive take on Friedrich, see this 2020 article. My friend Amelia Amon, an environmental activist, says Friedrich “had something to say about [nature’s] primal importance in soothing our ills & maintaining our quality of life.” Amelia also sent me an article about how Robert Crumb views our destruction of nature.
Further Reading: