The Brooklyn Rail

The first time I saw Monk by the Sea (1808–10) was in Intro to Art History at Duke University in the spring of 1986. Tough to say how good a slide Professor Walter Melion had when he projected it on the screen in the East Duke building lecture hall—until recently it was still difficult to get a good image of it. I now realize that it is because it is largely unreproducible. But the picture’s importance first entered my consciousness in Professor Claude Cernuschi’s twentieth century criticism class, when I bought Robert Rosenblum’s Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (1975). There it was on the cover—or at least a vertical detail—pretty off in its color. The black sans serif title floated to the top above the clouds, giving the image the space that is its subject. I attended the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, to study with Rosenblum. My eagerness was too evident—the first time I had lunch with him after a class I offered to sit in on both of his seminars the next term, even though I had other required classes I needed to take: he asked if I would also do his taxes. Rosenblum’s canonical text elevated non-French nineteenth-century art, expanding our understanding of postwar abstraction. This is a book that, like The Catcher in the Rye and The Friends of Eddie Coyle, if I said I have read it four times I would be low.

Daunted by the German tongue, despite the entertaining efforts of a woman named Doro who taught it to us budding art historians at the IFA in the 1990s, I stuck with my original plan and specialized in British art. But Friedrich’s enticing painting ranked high on my aesthetic bucket list. The artist’s works were unfamiliar in America, with only one in a public collection until 1990 when Rosenblum collaborated on an exhibition of works from Russian collections in the Met’s Lehman wing. This was followed four years later by a show at the Met of loans from the Oskar Reinhart Foundation, Winterthur, including the magical Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818–19). Then, in 2006, at the J. Paul Getty Museum in LA, I saw an exhibition of German paintings from Dresden, including Cross in the Mountains (1808). By then there were four in US institutions. But up to that point the Monk had not traveled, and it was not until spring break of 2014, when my family went to Germany for the first time, that I was poised to see it. March 21: visiting the Nationalgalerie with my daughter, then aged eleven (having exhausted my wife and seven-year-old son at the Neues Museum and Pergamonmuseum, who slogged back to the hotel). We poked around the nineteenth-century collection: a suite of Nazarene pictures, then Biedermeier works by Hummel and Gaertner—the bread-and-butter material one needed to study for Rosenblum’s Ph.D. orals exam at the IFA. And then we slipped into the Romanticism section, and I tried to prepare Hayden, excitedly telling her that in the next room are two of the greatest works of the Western canon: Friedrich’s Monk and Abbey in the Oak Wood (1809–10). We turned the corner, and there, against the gray wall, was but a standing folding ladder, a blank frame, and a table with a note on it that informed the once-in-a-lifetime visitor that both pictures were in the conservation studio. My daughter laughed. I shrank. And the sad realization that I would be thwarted in my quest cut my spirit. We looked at the other, now seemingly minor, Friedrichs, dutifully processed through the spectacular parade of Schinkel, Leibl, Böcklin, von Stuck, and Menzel, before my heroic daughter hit the wall. Two hours later we were at the bar/restaurant Gagarin—dedicated to cosmonauts in Prenzlauer Berg—trading the celestial for our thwarted brush with the spiritual.

Having slipped through my grasp, the Monk haunted my classes, with insufficient quality slides illustrating Friedrich’s Rückenfigur concept, and that drawback of all art history professors: the inability to convey the requisite enthusiasm for a work in front of a classroom of drowsy students plunged into darkness and staring at a projection on a screen because one has not actually confronted the work direct. The Monk obsessed me. Eluded me. Taunted me. In the absence of a plausible or economical reason to return to Germany, I would have to wait for the Monk to come to me.

It has, at last, come to pass. Thanks to the diligent deliberations and tremendous tradecraft between curators Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein; their team of art professionals and diplomats at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and their counterparts at the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; other institutions; and who knows how many German and American embedded assets, agents, and clandestine personnel; the picture is in America for the first time. One aspect in the favor of the show that helped tip the balance was that this is the 251st anniversary of the artist’s birth, the semi-quincentennial + 1. Thus, last year was the year of Friedrich in Germany, with a spate of shows that if not occasioning Friedrich fatigue in the nation, at least put so many works on view and gave him so much exposure that it rendered a limited, one-venue loan show to the USA possible. The Abbey did not make it, but the Monk was sent across the pond as an emissary, accompanied by other masterpieces that rarely leave their home institutions or venture beyond the borders of Deutschland, including fan favorites such as the operatic image of masculine overlook, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (ca. 1817), and that contre-jour heliolater, Woman before the Rising or Setting Sun (ca. 1818–24).

The Monk is the first picture in the installation that gets a long vista and its own wall, in the third section of the display titled “Nature and Faith.” It follows a suite of intense early drawings and prints, and Friedrich’s initial forays with oil paint in around 1807. But the Monk, dated 1808–10, presents itself as a singularly imaginative vision. The earlier arboreal or misty settings and picturesque and placid ink wash coastal views can hardly prepare you for this over five-and-a-half foot wide and three-and-a-half foot tall leap into the sublime void of faith. The radical nature of the composition has long been commented on: the horizon sits at a ratio of around one-to-five in height. The slightness of the collective land and sea mass reminds me of the final scene in Steven Spielberg’s cinematic bildungsroman, The Fabelmans (2022), in which the aspiring young director bludgeons his way into John Ford’s office and the Hollywood Golden Age director, played in a star turn by a very game David Lynch. A cigar-chomping Ford asks him what he knows about art and then commands him to examine a painting on the wall by Frederic Remington, The Fight for the Waterhole of 1903 (MFA, Houston), and to locate the horizon. Ford: “Now remember this. When the horizon’s at the bottom, it’s interesting. When the horizon’s at the top, it’s interesting. When the horizon’s in the middle, it’s boring as shit. Now, good luck to you. And get the fuck out of my office!”

Friedrich appears to have got the message long ago, drawing on the tradition of low horizons in Dutch Baroque landscapes, but tweaking the formula by gradually eliminating the middle ground from his pictures, as in View of the Elbe Valley (1807), lowering the horizon as in the early and large ink and wash Eastern Coast of Rügen with Shepherd (1805–06), and then replacing all those figures in his early sketchbooks shown frontally and in poses associated with melancholy such as Wanderer at a Milestone (1802) or the woodcut Woman with a Spiderweb (1803), or companionship in Friends beneath a Tree of 1801. By 1809 he flipped the figure and the sentiment—inserting Rückenfiguren, people seen from behind, as stand-ins for the viewer’s own experience of the depicted setting. All this was not wholly his own invention—just look at Vermeer’s famed View of Delft from the Mauritshuis of ca. 1659–61 (a picture he could not have known), with its relatively low horizon, slim bank of riparian sand, and minute conversing figures. The curators anachronistically but satisfyingly refer to the aforementioned Eastern Coast of Rügen with Shepherd as having a “minimalist composition.” Despite retaining the figure facing us and leaning on staff or crook in thought, it is the sheer expanse of nearly unvariegated sky above that startles. In Monk, Caspar David Friedrich added dramatic clouds and lighting to the sky, turned the figure nearly all the way around, edited out three ships originally along the horizon, and landed on a composition that ranks as one of the great pieces of design in Western art history, along with the likes of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (ca. 1511), Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (ca. 1665), Sargent’s Madame X (1883–84), Matisse’s Dance (1909), Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962), and Gerhard Richter’s Betty (1988). You can even stretch it to Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Rooms.”

But the picture is not only radical because of its focus on the intimacy of a new spirituality in the crush of the Napoleonic wars and its introduction of the everyperson Rückenfigur. We in New York have been privileged to be living with it for the past three weeks. I have been there three times. And what is clear is that this is the picture that changed the way we think about looking at people looking at pictures. On the second floor of the museum is Louis Léopold Boilly’s The Public Viewing David’s “Coronation” at the Louvre, painted the same year Friedrich finished the Monk. But this was a picture for narcissist Napoleonic France celebrating David’s epic painting of people in attendance six years earlier at the Emperor’s most narcissistic act—Napoleon ignoring the pope and crowning himself and then his queen, Joséphine. Boilly showed the crowd viewing this painting, not the solitary mediator—that was for those living under the French yoke as Friedrich was. But the practice of looking at art was to become universal.

Thus the monk. He is a Capuchin by his brown tunic (although Friedrich confusingly called him “a man … walking … in a black robe”): a Catholic Franciscan, depicted by a painter raised Lutheran, representing a universal Christianity. He stands on the highest point of a bank of sand colored a kind of putty with tufts of vegetation—like those curious passages of light-colored Arretine landscape in the background of Piero della Francesca’s pictures. The sea is the darkest part of the painting, flecked by whitecaps, churning in its depths. The recent cleaning has made more visible the three boats the artist sagely painted out: one at left and two at the right. The leftmost boats’ masts lean towards the right. He also eliminated a low fence to the right of the monk and along the edge of the dune with fishing nets hung up to dry—too mundane a detail for a picture about the expanse. There are definitely thirteen birds in the image with possibly one more conflated with a whitecap. All have taken wing and soar to the upper right corner, except for one gull taking off from the sands at foot level and to the left of the monk. Of course they are all white birds—fluttering spirits in wartime. Here is the sea as a place of malice and threat, danger and the unknown, trade and undefended assault. It is not the concept of the sea as a place of bathing and recreation that would evolve later in the century. It is more related to the way Iris Murdoch characterized her similarly northern Europe body of water in The Sea, The Sea (1978)—a largely inhospitable cold aqueous realm that reflected the narrator’s psychological state. Yet directly above the monk’s head the clouds open into a gap revealing light tones and white puffy cumulus clouds, recalling the heavenly ascent of the soul of Count Orgaz in El Greco’s grand sepulchral painting in Toledo, Spain.

What is often missed in the picture, especially with the deletion of the lower-left to upper-right leaning ships, is the ripping left-to-right wind, also reflected in the diagonal trajectory of the middle range of gray clouds and the flight of the birds. This is just as in the lower left to upper right flow of rock and trees and mist in Morning Mist in the Mountains (probably 1807–08): the natural movements of the brush of the right-handed artist. But by eliminating the ships Friedrich also accentuated the grid of the horizontals and drew more importance to the single monk: the painter demands you stand in line with the figure so that the picture, as with the angle of the monk’s vision, opens out to the right.

The German artist who seems most to have understood the modern vision of Friedrich is Thomas Struth. In his “Museum Photographs” series, beginning in 1989, Struth produced large-scale images, in the main, of people looking at art, creating a connection, then, with the viewers of Struth’s self-same photographs as displayed in galleries or museums. As Sophie Howarth has noted, the series renders visible our culture’s quest for the spiritual in art, in the act of seeking out art and looking, and in the photographer’s rendering of that act for all time through the lens. It is Friedrich who begat this idea, and photography that cemented it. Think of Peter A. Juley’s photo of Barnett Newman and an unidentified woman in front of the Abstract Expressionist’s Cathedra in Newman’s studio in 1958. There are three cuts in the walls within the show that provide seating and a respite for the foot-weary museumgoer, but also brilliantly allow additional vistas into the galleries and the hang. As in Struth’s series, they permit the visitor to see from behind visitors on the benches looking at standing visitors looking at the art, the central conceit of Friedrich’s art, and a self-reflexive impulse evident in Boilly’s picture and since. The political, religious, aesthetic, design, and sublime elements of Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea elevate it above the rest of the artist’s productions as a landscape of its fraught moment. But the way it entices us to enter a form of mediation before it, to move back and watch others assume our spot, to layer Rückenfigur upon Rückenfigur, and to inch us closer to an understanding of the natural world as well as the rarefied realm of aesthetic contemplation, in a media-saturated, device-addicted reality, is the Greifswalder’s greatest gift.

Accompanying soundtrack for Monk by the Sea:
Led Zeppelin, “The Ocean” (1973)
Jackson Browne, “Late for the Sky” (1974)
Neil Young, “I’m the Ocean” (1995)
Father John Misty, “Mahashmashana” (2024)

This essay is dedicated to Walter Robinson (1950–2025), an aesthetically voracious consumer of art, who loved watching people looking at works. He would have adored this show. Or hated it. But he would not have cared one bit about the curation.