The Met presents First Major Retrospective in the United States dedicated to Caspar David Friedrich

Friedrich’s art presents nature as a site of personal and philosophical discovery. Marshalling the expressive power of perspective, light, color, and atmosphere, the artist created landscapes that articulate a profound connection between the natural world and the inner self, or soul. This imagery encapsulated the newly emerging ideals of Romanticism, a cultural revolution that championed conceptions of individual perception and feeling that are still vital today.

“The most significant German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich brilliantly illuminates our understanding of the natural world as a spiritual and emotional landscape,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “This very first major retrospective in the United States of Germany’s most beloved painter follows the celebrations of Friedrich’s work in Europe on the occasion of the artist’s 250th birthday in 2024. We are thrilled to collaborate with our German museum colleagues and many other generous lenders on this rare opportunity to reflect on Friedrich’s portrayals of nature and the human condition."“Friedrich's art evokes a watershed moment in the development of human understanding of the natural world,” said Alison Hokanson, Curator, Department of European Paintings, The Met, and co-curator of the exhibition. “His landscapes mark the rise of the Romantic entwinement of nature and the self—a sensibility that intersected with the start of the industrial revolution and the growth of what we now call ecological awareness. Looking at his work, we can discern the beginnings of an experience of nature that is still with us.”

“The pictorial language that Friedrich and his fellow Romantics developed to express a connection with nature is deeply ingrained in how we see and represent the world, both in art and in popular visual culture,” says Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Met, and co-curator of the exhibition. “We invite audiences to explore Friedrich’s landscapes as they would have been understood in the artist’s own time and to consider their resonance today, when the environment is at the forefront of cultural and political discourse.”

Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature will present oil paintings, finished drawings, and working sketches from every phase of the artist’s career, along with select examples by his contemporaries, illuminating Friedrich’s development of a symbolic vocabulary of landscape motifs to convey the personal and existential meanings that he discovered in nature. Among the loans that will be exhibited for the first time in the United States are Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Hamburger Kunsthalle) and Monk by the Sea (Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), two icons of Romantic art. Many other signature works, such as Dolmen in Autumn(Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), have not been seen in the United States for decades.

The exhibition will also bring together for the first time all five of the Friedrich paintings owned by museums in the United States (The Met, the Kimbell Art Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Saint Louis Art Museum), placing these rare American holdings in the broader context of Friedrich’s art. A rich selection of works on paper from domestic and international collections will showcase Friedrich’s talents as a draftsman and the centrality of drawing to his creative practice. The assortment illuminates the ways the artist worked across media and how different materials and techniques shaped his style. Paintings and drawings by Friedrich’s compatriots Johan Christian Dahl, Carl Gustav Carus, August Heinrich, and others will delineate his artistic context. These works, almost entirely drawn from The Met’s collection, highlight the strength of the northern Romantic holdings that the Museum has amassed in the past 35 years, an uncommon strength among institutions in the United States.

Main Image: Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840). Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (detail), ca. 1817. Oil on canvas, 37 3/8 × 29 1/2 in. (94.8 × 74.8 cm). Hamburger Kunsthalle, on permanent loan from the Stiftung Hamburger Kunstsammlungen, acquired 1970 (HK-5161). Photo: Elke Walford