This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

---

In September, two cities in Germany took part in a peculiar bet. Greifswald, a once-bustling trade centre on the Baltic coast, laid down the gauntlet to Dresden: which of their respective marketplaces could gather the most people together dressed in Romantic-era costumes? 

The occasion for this weird wager was Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th birthday. Friedrich, the celebrated landscape painter whose work has become synonymous with German identity and an otherworldly Romanticism, was born in 1774 in Greifswald, whilst Dresden later became his adopted home. Between these two places, he found inspiration in the surrounding forests, harbours, seascapes and mountains, inhaling nature to “exhale it again as art”.

“Cake for Caspar” may be a hit in Greifswald and Dresden today but it is striking to remember that the paintings now considered Friedrich’s most iconic, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) and Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818), were only discovered a century ago. The resurrection and subsequent apotheosis of the master’s reputation is nothing short of miraculous considering that, as Florian Illies observes in his new book, The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey through Time, “at the end of the 19th century, there was no one left who knew [his] name”. 

Friedrich rather naively believed his reputation would precede him so “never took the trouble to sign any of his paintings”. This was a typical piece of eccentricity. The artist would regularly brave temperatures of –20°C in search of his sublime vistas and, though he welcomed visitors to his studio, he could only offer guests a single chair, for that was all he owned. 

In this sweeping and timely retrospective, Illies examines how Friedrich escaped obscurity to attain his current eminence as one of Germany’s most famous cultural exports. He uses the bold device of a series of semi-fictionalised vignettes to illuminate the man behind the paintbrush. 

Readers should be warned, however. Illies takes some appropriately artistic liberties with his reimagining of Friedrich’s inner thoughts and feelings. “If it was up to him,” we are told in one passage, as the artist wistfully stares out to sea, “he would do nothing else for the rest of his life — he was the Romantic type in that way.” This speculative sentimentality can grate at times, but otherwise there is much to enjoy.

The greatest pleasure of the book lies not in these fantasies, but in the myriad true — and often bizarre — afterlives of Friedrich’s paintings. Here Illies offers a series of diverting backstories that will surprise even the most knowledgeable of devotees.

Take, for instance, one of Friedrich’s first major works, Cross in the Mountains (1808), otherwise known as the Tetschen Altar. With its moody summit and dark forestry overpowering a slight crucified figure of Christ, the painting provoked outrage throughout conservative Saxony, as Friedrich suggested that nature was the real divine object of worship. “It is truly arrogant,” one contemporary wrote, that landscape painting should “want to sneak into the churches and onto the altars.” 

How thrilling then to discover that — even though Friedrich had intended it for a religious setting — the painting’s buyer, Countess von Thun, had other ideas: perhaps the picture’s broodiness sparked in her some erotic reverie, for she hung it above her marital bed. Illies certainly thinks so, for that too, he writes wryly, is “one way of celebrating nature”. Nine months later she gave birth to a son and appropriately christened him Friedrich. 

These unexpected bit players in Friedrich’s story set this endeavour apart from your average art biography. There is the expected biographical detail of the wheres, whens and whys, but Illies also throws us some gratifying curveballs, as in the case of the hubristic mayor of Gützkow. Johann Balthasar Pütter blew up the megalithic grave that inspired Cairn in Snow (1807), only then to be promptly struck down by lightning himself. Or the Yugoslav underworld kingpin who orchestrated the 1994 theft of Friedrich’s Nebelschwaden (1820) alongside two paintings by Turner from a museum in Frankfurt, hiding them for years in disused tyres in a car repair shop. 

Whilst Friedrich’s landscapes are renowned for their melancholic introspection, the human stories that illuminate them here are anything but tranquil. In recounting multiple fires and criminal heists, Illies reveals that the afterlife of a painting can be steeped in danger and intrigue. 

In this short volume (just 170 pages), the ground covered is staggering. From Nosferatu (1922) to Walt Disney’s Bambi (1942), Friedrich’s art has inspired innumerable other works. The Irish playwright Samuel Beckett famously cited Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1820) as a visual source for his solipsistic tragicomedy, Waiting for Godot (1952). Illies breezes over these interesting nuggets, but one never wants for detail, as if this were a Tardis in book form.

Historically, too, it’s a whirlwind. We range from the Napoleonic Wars through unification and the Weimar Republic to the rise of the Third Reich, Stalinist Russia, the generation of “68, through the early Nineties and beyond. “Every period in turn, ours included, has tried to grasp the meaning of Friedrich’s pictures.” The book fully delivers on the promise of its subtitle: a journey through time.

Unfortunately, Friedrich’s best-known and most ill-fated glorification came with the Nazis. In Friedrich’s depictions of the frigid Baltic sea and dense, bristling Germanic forest, National Socialism saw its natural inheritance. This was “blood and soil” art, the kind that defined “the Lutheran, the Nordic, the medieval, [and] the Bronze age”. It helped, of course, that Friedrich was himself blondish and blue-eyed. Hitler even owned a painting — The Watzmann (1825) — which he hung on the wall of his alpine Berghof retreat.

During the Second World War, Friedrich’s art was thus inappropriately co-opted as propaganda. In the spring of 1943, German soldiers destined for the Eastern front were not only treated to a lecture on Friedrich from a professor of art history the evening before they set out, but each was given “a little book for the chest pocket of their uniform jackets” containing his landscapes. Many died associating him with “home”. 

However much the Nazi war machine may have revered Friedrich, its unfathomable capacity for destruction came in a roundabout way even for him in the end. Indeed, Illies’ most poignant tale involves one of Friedrich’s better-known works. Sea of Ice (1824) is threatening in its magnificence; shards of ice jut out in cold abstraction. The painting was partly inspired by Friedrich’s traumatic childhood experience when he became submerged under a frozen lake. Tragedy struck when his younger brother, Johann Christoffer, died trying to save him. 

More than any of his other works, the almost conceptual Sea of Ice anticipates contemporary art. It inspired the founder of the Bauhaus movement, Walter Gropius, to memorialise those killed during the 1920 Kapp Putsch in Weimar. Although the resemblance between the two works is obvious, the Nazis destroyed Gropius’ piece in 1936 as an example of Entartete Kunst, “degenerate art”. The irony, Illies remarks, is too mournful to laugh at.

It may seem astonishing to think that Caspar David Friedrich’s reputation escaped unscathed from its association with the Nazis, but his paintings boast a rare transcendental quality that defies easy, or lazy, categorisation. They convey loneliness and solitude so acutely that they never lent themselves to any pernicious form of groupthink. 

250 years later, Friedrich’s reputation is finally where it should be. But as Illies clearly demonstrates, there remains much to uncover about the paintings themselves; the lives they have touched, the spaces they have inhabited and the eras they have existed within.

Art history need not be confined to the cold white wall of a gallery. Open this volume and take delight in realising that, the more you delve into the backstories of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, “the more complicated it gets”.