The Glorious, Tortured Imagination of Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich is considered one of the most important German painters, and his landscape works live large in the cultural consciousness in Germany and beyond. You have probably seen the 19th-century artist's most famous painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, a lone figure that you see from the back looking out over a wide valley of cliffs and mists.

To mark what would have been the 250th birthday of Friedrich, over the last year, major institutions have been celebrating the artist’s works: a vast oeuvre of deeply contemplative, almost surreal landscapes that broke with their times. A string of major exhibitions took place throughout 2024 across Germany, and this month, that roving program reached its final stop with a blockbuster exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. “The Soul of Nature” is on view through May 11, and it is the largest showing of Friedrich’s works to come together in the U.S., including an impressive amount of loans of works that rarely travel (Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is one of them). Shows in 2024 in Europe included "Art for a New Age" at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, "Unending Landscapes" at the Berlin State Museums, and "Where it All Began" at the Dresden State Collections.

Art Critic Ben Davis, recently saw the show at the Met, which opened this month, and Senior Editor, Kate Brown, had the pleasure of seeing the Dresden exhibition in December, which happens to be the city where Friedrich lived and made most of his famous works. Davis joins Brown on the podcast to discuss Friedrich's enduring legacy, and they dive into some of the major currents in his work, as well as the backstory that underpins his serene nature scenes: shifting ideas about religion and the spirit transforming European consciousness and a very tumultuous time in the continent's history.