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Lot n° 110

Caspar David Friedrich

Estimate :
150 000 - 200 000 EUR
Bid

Caspar David Friedrich (1774 Greifswald - Dresden 1840) - Morning Mist - Bohemian Landscape. Watercolor over pencil and black pen on wove paper. 1828. 12.8 x 20.5 cm. Dated in gray pen lower left "den 16t Maij 1828" and titled lower right "Morgennebel". The inventor of Romanticism, Caspar David Friedrich, was born in Greifswald 250 years ago and created art for a new age in Dresden - the title of the most recent exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. After studying at the Academy in Copenhagen, Friedrich settled in Dresden in 1798, where he became the dominant figure in the art scene in Dresden after 1800. Here he made his epochal break with the traditions of Baroque and Classicism, here he united landscape and religion, here he created a pictorial world that challenged and sometimes overwhelmed the viewer - so radically modern were his pictorial inventions, which aimed for a very unique aesthetic effect. Friedrich "romanticized" the "ordinary" and "familiar" in the sense of Novalis, reshaping and exaggerating the motif of landscape, placing it at the center of his aesthetic and, not least, making it an expression of his sacred understanding of the world. In our watercolor, the viewer's gaze falls into a landscape that stretches far into the depths, over a slightly rising hill divided into horizontal strips of color and into a valley, behind which a mountain range joins. Friedrich spreads out the landscape, the view is not limited, it is not a landscape composition in the classical sense, where trees or other repoussoirs enter the landscape space - in his work the landscape is open, "unbounded" as it were, limited to the section that presented itself to Friedrich. And yet he does not just depict a simple section of nature; rather, Friedrich subordinates nature to a system of drawing and compositional calculation: The lower half of the sheet is carefully constructed from four horizontal, two-dimensional strips of color, whose abstract form contrasts with the undulating silhouette of the mountains, which Friedrich has indicated only with a fine pen, without color. Our watercolor is an outstanding example of how Friedrich sees nature - in his work, nature does not look as it is, but as he sees it. He subjects nature to a subjectivism that was only possible during the Romantic period! Using sparing drawing techniques, Friedrich therefore creates a landscape that presents more than just a section of nature: Right on the border, where the abstracted form merges into an observation of nature, there is a stone wayside shrine with a cross on the hill. It is no coincidence that it is placed right in the middle of the sheet - the wayside shrine is the power center of the picture, it fills the sheet with the religious symbolism that is so characteristic of Friedrich and is further enhanced by the handwritten caption "Morgennebel" (morning mist), which is staged like a title. In Friedrich's work, fog is far more than just a weather phenomenon; it is subject to a poetry all of its own that has religious traits. Helmut Börsch-Supan has also pointed out that in the inscription, after his serious illness in 1825/26, which he had not yet completely overcome in the spring of 1828, Friedrich expresses the hope that the rising morning sun will lift the impenetrable fog of the night, which is a metaphor for his illness. As a kind of therapy, Friedrich would have undertaken a hike to Bohemia in the spring of 1828, during which our watercolor was created in the Teplitz region. Friedrich had come to Teplitz in northern Bohemia on May 9, 1828, together with August Philipp Clara, a copper engraver and landscape painter from the Baltic who worked in St. Petersburg and with whom Friedrich had been acquainted since a visit to his studio two years earlier. They came to an area that Friedrich had known well since 1807. On the very day of their arrival, Friedrich produced a watercolor of the ruins on the castle hill near Teplitz (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen zu Dresden, Kupferstich-Kabinett, inv. no. 1913-33, cf. Grummt 929) and, according to the dated watercolors, remained in the area until May 16 (Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst, Den kongelige Købberstiksamling, inv. no. KKS 1975-605, cf. Grummt 912). Our watercolour, also painted on 16 May, is similar to the Copenhagen sheet in its strip-like development of the landscape - on both sheets, the foreground is captured in broad brushstrokes of colour. Friedrich was evidently interested in capturing the color impressions offered to him by the morning mist in the landscape view. The yellow and green stripes in the foreground

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