Caspar David Friedrich: Mesmerized By Nature - by Donald Kuspit

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog, 1818

By DONALD KUSPIT February 22, 2025

            Does it make sense to connect the painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and the physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815)—“at times compared to Columbus,” for Mesmer also “discovered a new world”—the unconscious, and “a new principle called animal magnetism,” and with that “a healing method that retained no ties with religion and satisfied the requirements of an ‘enlightened’ era.”(1)  Friedrich’s paintings have been said to be religious—Christian—in import, but The Monk By The Sea, 1808-1810 is a token presence, a trivial repoussoir device, an exclamation mark signaling the vastness—sublimity—of the sea and sky, both emblematic of universal nature, the naturalness of the universe.  The Abbey In The Oakwood, 1808-1810 is a ruin.  The monks—small and trivial compared to the barren trees—are heading to a ruined, dead church with a coffin, the desolate, abandoned church suggests that resurrection is not in the offing, indeed, a lie.  The Monk By The Sea makes the futility, not to say absurdity, of religion self-evident:  a trivial, barely visible figure—he seems like a mirage in the mist—the monk is all but meaningless compared to the sea, sky, and earth that encompasses him.  He is alone and must feel lonely, his existence purposeless and meaningless, compared to the nature in which he is immersed.

The monk is even more lonely—isolated—than The Lonely Tree, 1822, withered and all but dead yet still with some green leaves, and with the company, however distant, but on the same plain, of trees and bushes, all green, the color of life, as Goethe—who discovered Friedrich—reminds us.  The same depressing view of nature—of a nature depressed and near death—appears in Cairn in Snow, 1807, Winter Landscape, 1811, with its withered, leafless trees, and The Tree of Crows, 1822.  Nature is dead in these works, and religion, classical and Christian, is dead—in ruins—in The Temple of Juno in Agrigento, 1828-1830 and Ruins (of Eldena Abbey) in the Giant Mountains, 1830-1834.  Nietzsche said “God is dead”—implicitly the Christian god (he preferred Apollo and Dionysus, pagan gods)—and Friedrich can be said to have foreseen that death, for there are no intact churches and temples in which one can worship any god.  In all these works there is an implicit sense of despair, managed with aesthetic brilliance and formal eloquence.  Friedrich suffered severe depressive episodes in “1799”—when he was 25—‘’1803-1805, c. 1813, in 1816”—probably a midlife crisis--and “between 1824 and 1826.”  I suggest that he managed and mastered his depression by projecting it into his art.  If Freud is right in regarding “depression to be an exaggerated form of guilt and self-blame,” then Friedrich’s attack on civilized religion, implicit in his depictions of ruined Christian churches, small monks pathetically isolated in infinite nature, suggesting the futility of their existence, and classical temples of obsolete pagan religion in ruins, then many of Friedrich’s works are the products of his guilt at his disbelief in organized, regimented, civilized—and civilizing--religion.  It was responsible for his sickness unto death, as Kierkegaard called depression.  He is said to have depicted his own funeral. 

            Friedrich found a cure for his depression in uncivilized nature—like other German romanticists, he was mesmerized by it, as Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog, 1818, his most famous painting, shows, but in the end it failed him, as The Sea Of Ice, 1823-1824, with its wrecked ship, suggests.  It was painted when he was depressed; the painting epitomized his death anxiety.  The work was commissioned by a collector, who wanted it to show Northern Nature in the Whole of her Terrifying Beauty—its companion piece was to show Southern Nature in her Abundant and Majestic Splendor.  Friedrich’s masterpiece “met with incomprehension” because of its radical composition—implicitly abstract—remained unsold when Friedrich died in 1840, because, I suggest, it wreaked of death, as the wrecked ship made clear.  In Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog, a solitary young man, bareheaded and well dressed—Friedrich himself, as his hair color suggests—and holding a walking stick in his right hand, stands on the edge of a cliff, looking out at a landscape.  The landscape is raw, the earth colored rocky mountains in the distance uninhabitable, precariously balanced the civilized young man stands high above it on a cliff, his left leg at its edge, his right leg set back.  He is in effect mesmerized by the landscape.  Much of it is shrouded in fog, but the fog partially lifts below his feet, revealing some raw rocks, in the distance mountains rise beyond the horizon, signaled by two isosceles triangles on their sides, pointing to Friedrich in the center, heroically alone on the heights.  He is a far cry from one of his monks and the raw mountains are a far cry from one of his refined but ruined religious structures. 

            The philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, who is said to have influenced Caspar David Friedrich, wrote “Religion is the miracle of direct relationship with the infinite,” in Addresses on Religion, 1799.  Such a mystical miracle implies an altered state of consciousness.  But in Friedrich’s altered state of consciousness—signaled by his turning his back on everyday consciousness, the fact that he is “out of this world”—he had on the mountain—more like Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain” than Moses’ Mount Sinai--Friedrich did not have a “direct relationship with the infinite” but with raw nature:  he was mesmerized—hypnotized—by it.  He was in a state of “somnambulic lucidity.”  Friedrich was a German Romanticist, and “The German Romanticists were interested in animal magnetism for two reasons:  the first being the attraction of Mesmer’s theory of a universal physical ‘fluid.’  Romantic philosophers visualized the universe as a living organism endowed with a soul pervading the whole and connecting its parts.  Mesmer’s physical fluid—had its existence been demonstrated—would have furnished evidence of the Romantic conception.” (2)  Dare one say that the sliver of illuminated sea in Moonrise Over The Sea, 1822 is that mesmerizing fluid?   And also the white sea of fog in Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog.  And the sea of light in Voyage at Dusk and Autumn Evening on the Lake, both 1805.  And in Morning in the Mountains, 1822-1823.

            But perhaps the more personal reason the German Romanticists were interested in mesmerism—hypnotism—was “Puysegur’s discovery of magnetic somnambulism with its extra-lucid manifestations…The Romanticists now assumed that somnambulistic lucidity would enable the human mind to establish communication with the World Soul.”(3)  Friedrich’s paintings have a somnambulistic lucidity, that is, a hypnotic clarity and precision.  It is what gives them their visionary aura.  The Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog is hypnotized by nature, and so is the Woman at a Window, 1822, also seen from the back, and the Man and Woman Contemplating The Moon, ca. 1824, magnetically luminous.  The figures are measuring sticks for immeasurable nature, perceived in a somnambulistic state of mind, peculiarly extrasensory yet empirically exacting, matter of factly realistic yet imaginatively profound, for Friedrich suggests that reality is uncanny.  What we see with somnambulistic clarity is an empirical hallucination.  “Artists and connoisseurs saw in Friedrich’s art only a kind of mystic…They did not see Friedrich’s faithfulness and conscientious study of nature in everything he represented,” the art historian William Vaughn notes.  But Friedrich’s conscientious study of nature was made possible by his mesmerizing experience of it.  The somnambulistic lucidity with which he invests nature made him an imaginative realist--a conscientious, meticulous observer of every detail, not to say nuance, of its auratic appearance.  The worship of nature was his only religion. WM   

 Notes

            (1)Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious:  The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York:  Basic Books, 1970), 56

            (2)Ibid., 57

            (3)Ibid.