Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 8 to May 11, 2025
The Met billed this as the first comprehensive U.S. exhibition devoted to Caspar David Friedrich, bringing together roughly 75 works across oil paintings, finished drawings, and working sketches, plus selected works by contemporaries to sharpen the context.
The curatorial intelligence (by Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein) was to resist the one-image shorthand that tends to follow Friedrich, especially the meme-ified cliche of “Wanderer,” and to build an argument out of motifs. The press material lays those themes out explicitly: spirituality and religion, the infinite and unknowable, time and mortality, solitude and companionship, the familiar versus the unknown, and the perilous beauty of the sublime.
Early Friedrich appears as draftsman and printmaker, someone who draws outside, tests techniques, and only later, steps into oil with public ambition. The Met’s “Inside the Exhibition” material emphasizes that trajectory, and in the galleries you could feel it: the authority of pencil and wash, the way a plant study or a rocky outcrop can serve as a rehearsal for metaphysical drama. Friedrich’s breakthrough ink-wash drawings, made for public exhibitions in Dresden and Weimar, and these don’t “illustrate” Romanticism so much as manufacture a mood.
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