English
There are many persuasive claims which are capable of guiding our steps towards the splendid neoclassic building of Corinthian aspect which is where the Alte Nationalgalerie is in Berlin (http://www.smb.museum/smb/sammlungen/details.php?lang=en&objID=17&n=1&r=2). Among others, its own façade of red sandstone, built between 1866 and 1876 according to its design inspired by Schinkel, by the architects Friedrich August Stüler and Johann Heinrich Strack, which had to be rebuilt, like the rest of the building, after the damage caused by Allied bombing during the Second World War, and the outstanding presence in its rooms of the ´Mill On The Couleuvre at Pontoise´, the first work by Cezanne which was exhibited in a museum, some splendid paintings by Manet and Degas, its excellent collection of scultpures and, most specially, its romantic painting section, where they shine with their own light, shall we say dark and golden, tumultuous and calm, the seventeen paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1744-1840), one of the indisputable cult painters of the last two-hundred years, which is exhibited here.
Referring to romantic paitning, David D´Angers coined the term ´The Landscape Tragedy´. Friedrich is probably the painter who best illustrates the whole extension and depth of this concept of his time. To understand this tragedy we have to remember that the romantic artist is permanently tormented by the conscience of rift, which characterized modernity like few other things did. A conscience which the conception of the landscape won´t be alienated at all, expressing with tears and an impossible melancholic feeling a nostalgia which is outside all measure for this entirety which, inevitably lost, it felt that it had sometime been a constitutive element of the human condition. Because man and nature had been perceived to be hidden, there was only nostalgia left for that ideal Golden Age before the separation, a nostalgia which was expressed with the poetic search of an ideal Nature, where reason and human freedom weren´t yet at odds, whose representation was what landscape painting was aiming for.
Despite the shocking and unavoidable precedents which were established in past centuries by painters like Georgione, El Greco, Claude Lorrain or Nicolas Poussin, it´s valid to argue that it isn´t until the romantic movement that painting manages to represent a completely autonomous landscape, where human protagonism is virtually non-existant. In this Nature resides an essentially tragic duality, because on one hand it´s the source from which all human creativity flows and, on the other, an impenetrable and terrible abyss which condemns it to destruction in an unquestionable way, which results in a shivering mix of joy and melancholy, of sweetness and fear, of exaltation and dread, which characterizes, for example, the unforgettable paintings of Friedrich, a privileged and tense landscape of great romantic drama, which has beauty and destruction as protagonists. A drama in which Nature, hence the tragedy of the landscape, doesn´t offer warmth, refuge or consolation, but fascinates, amazes and inspires a reverential fear of numinous character.
Words that, deep down, don´t do much justice to the deep vertigo that the unforgettable paintings by Friedrich cause us, which always seem to summon us from that other side of things, so familiar and at the same time so unknown. Lean over your own unspeakable abyss when you rent apartments in Berlin
Translated by: aleixgwilliam