Caspar David Friedrich and the Aesthetics of Community
2015; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/srm.2015.0000
ISSN2330-118X
Autores ResumoNINA AMSTUTZ Caspar David Friedrich and the Aesthetics ofCommunity I N 1826, GOETHE DESCRIBED AN ACQUAINTANCE OF HIS AS SUFFERING FROM the “universal illness of the current time, subjectivity.”1 He equated this “disease” with Romanticism, declaring the turn inward as a retrograde force in history and a threat to great art. A consideration of Friedrich Kersting’s famous portrait of Caspar David Friedrich in his atelier (fig. 1) leads to precisely such an understanding of the Romantic subject. The art ist is represented alone in his Dresden studio, deeply absorbed in his work. The room is conspicuously empty; only an easel, chair, a few palettes, and the artist himself occupy the space. The lack of props or sketches from which Friedrich works strongly evokes his often-cited aphorism, “The art ist should not merely paint what he sees before him but also what he sees within him. ”2 This inward-oriented approach to painting has implications for the viewer’s experience as well. The artist’s canvas is turned away from the viewer, so that each individual is left to imagine the content of Friedrich’s painting. This work leaves us with an image of the Romantic artist as an isolated genius and viewership is represented as an equally with drawn and solitary activity. The idea that subjective feeling is central to both the production and re ception of Friedrich’s art has led to the repeated use of the term Sinnoffenheit (open-ended meaning) to characterize his landscapes. This emphasis on subjectivity naturally resists any form of shared experience between viewer and artist, or among viewers themselves. Accordingly, Friedrich’s I foremost thank Kajri Jain for first introducing me to the literature on community and intersubjectivity that inspired this essay. I would also like to thank Mark A. Cheetham, the editors of SiR, and the anonymous reviewers of this essay for their generous feedback. 1. [“Er ist ein entscheidenes Talent, daran ist kein Zweifel, allem er leidet an der allgemeinen Krankheit der jetzigen Zeit, an der Subjektivitat, und davon mochte ich ihn heilen’j. Johann Peter Eckermann, Cesprdche tnit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1982), 147. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 2. (“Der Maier soli nicht blob malen, was er vor sich sieht, sondern auch, was er in sich sieht”]. Sigrid Hinz, ed., Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen (Munich: Henschelverlag, 1974), 125. SiR, 54 (Winter 2015) 447 448 NINA AMSTUTZ Figure x: Georg Friedrich Kersting, Caspar David Friedrich in his Studio, 1812, Oil on canvas, 51 x 40 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Photo credit: bpk, Berlin/Alte Nationalgalerie/Joerg P. Anders/ Art Resource, NY. work is often contrasted with the collective aspirations of Philipp Otto Runge and the Nazarenes. In practice, however, Romantic subjectivity cannot be reduced to an unequivocal retreat from others and the world. As Hilmar Frank notes, art in the Romantic period begins to function as a “problematization of being, as an investigation into and expression of [the subject’s] forever evolving relation to the world.”3 Implicit in the explora tion of Dasein (being), though, is necessarily also the question of Mitsein (being-with). To use Jean-Luc Nancy’s words, “Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence.”4 This ontological truth has become fashion3 . [“Kunst als Problematisierung des Daseins, als Erforschung und Ausdruck immer neuer Weltbeziehungen”]. Frank, “Die mannigfaltigen Wege zur Kunst: Romantische Kunstphilosophie in einem Schema Caspar David Friedrichs,” Idea: Werke, Theorien, Dokumente, Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle io (1991): 170. 4. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stan ford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3. FRIEDRICH AND AESTHETICS OF COMMUNITY 449 able in recent years, prompting revisionary scholarship on much of the German Idealist tradition. Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, for instance, have all been the subject ofrecent publications on community or intersubjectivity.5 Prompted by the recent discourse surrounding intersubjectivity, I will question whether there is any evocation of community in the work of Caspar David Friedrich, an artist whose conscious self-fashioning as a re cluse strongly suggests otherwise.6 Has the...
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