Being and nothing Caspar David Friedrich: The Monk by the Sea

Sándor Radnóti

doi:10.1556/170.2018.59.1.7

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Acta Historiae Artium Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae

Volume/Issue:: Volume 59: Issue 1

Being and nothing Caspar David Friedrich: The Monk by the Sea

Author:

Sándor Radnóti

Sándor Radnóti
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Pages:: 219–231

Online Publication Date:: Dec 2018

Publication Date:: 01 Dec 2018

Article Category:: Research Article

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1556/170.2018.59.1.7

Keywords:: landscape; seascape; Caspar David Friedrich: Monk by the Sea; minimalism; accidental masterpiece; Heinrich von Kleist; Clemens Brentano; Friedrich Schleiermacher; “Rückenfigur”; staffage figures; Jan van Eyck; turning nothingness into landscape; anxiety

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Available only in print. Until 2020, Acta Historiae Artium was published in print only, with basic information on its contents accessible on the website. Online articles have been available since Volume 62 (2021).

The Monk by the Sea stands alone in the oeuvre of Caspar David Friedrich. Unlike the majority of his works, which are generally overburdened with meaning, making them easy to understand from a Romantic, Christian or nationalist perspective, this painting remained resistant to interpretation by almost all of his contemporaries – even by the artist himself – because the reduction and “minimalism” in the work was so unprecedented and extreme that it would take several generations before it became common practice. This was also the first work to feature Friedrich’s famous innovation, the Rückenfigur, the picture’s internal spectator, who forms a close and subjective bond with the external spectator, while the subject of the spectacle itself, for the very first time in the history of painting, is “nothing”.

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Acta Historiae Artium Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae

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Acta Historiae Artium
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