Caspar David Friedrich is one of my favourite artists. He had a Romantic and, at first glance, seductive desire to find God in nature. If you described what he tried to do it would seem attractive, but if you actually tried to live that life you would find what he found... that in trying to find God apart from in Jesus Christ you will always find both common grace and the universal curse on the ground, and so you'll be constantly bouncing between happiness and despair.
Only in Jesus Christ can you make a decsive shift and break from the curse to new life and happiness.
The trouble is that when you develop the creed of a personal religion to the extent that he did, so that every day he had to recreate his experience of God - re-find his experience of divinity before nature - it placed such a burden on the individual as to be almost impossible to sustain. Yes, on a good day, Friedrich could find God in a radiant evening sky but on so many other days the vision didn’t come, all he could see was darkness, death even a kind of anguish. I think that Friedrich set out to be a painter of a new kind of Christianity but I think what he really created was a very moving series of monuments to an age of deep, deep anxiety.
(Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Germany, Episode 2, BBC4, 6 December 2010)
Thanks for this post. I saw Andrew Graham-Dixon talking about this on the Culture Show and was struck by the very same comment. Hope you had a good break.
ReplyDeleteBreak was good. Although all the socialising tired me out rather than rested me!
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