ART REVIEW : Modest Masterwork : German Painter Uses Symbols of Nature to Convey Spirit

If you really want to know the astonishing paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), the great German Romantic painter, you must go to Dresden. Few of his paintings are outside Germany, while the best collection remains in the great city on the Elbe River, where Friedrich settled at the age of 24 and lived for the rest of his life.

If you want a tasty sample of Friedrich’s genius, however, just enough to propel you on your way to undying devotion, a brief but exceptionally good introduction will soon be available in Malibu. By early August, the J. Paul Getty Museum expects to have on view its most recent knockout acquisition: Friedrich’s “A Walk at Dusk” (circa 1830-35), which the museum bought in May at a London auction for $3.6 million.

That’s a lot of money for a little painting--at 13-by-17 inches, it cost $16,000 a square inch--but a big idea is packed inside its modest dimensions. By endowing the imagery of natural phenomena with an aura of haunting, spiritual content, Friedrich gave exquisite shape to a new and commanding convention. Painting was transformed.

“A Walk at Dusk” shows a figure in a long, fur-collared coat and hat standing in a gently rolling, wintry field surrounded by a mist-laden, wooded landscape. He has come to a clearing dramatically framed by barren trees.

Head lowered and hands clasped, the solitary figure contemplates a megalithic tomb, composed of a huge boulder resting atop smaller stones, rising somberly before him. A sliver of crescent moon and a tiny dot of light--the evening star--give pale illumination to the twilight scene.

A moving meditation on mortality, the painting merges a host of secular and religious symbols to cast its spell. The wintry season, twilight hour and skeletal tree-limbs speak of death, as does the megalithic tomb.

Coupled with the cyclical nature of time and the seasons, the ancient tomb suggests both inevitability and renewal. Its raised, horizontal slab also recalls traditional images of Christ’s Resurrection--except, no spectral body is seen arising from the dead. Only the new moon glowing in the heavens above is being reborn.

Friedrich commonly used the crescent moon as a complex, resonant symbol for Christ. Illuminated by light reflected from the sun, God-like source of all Life, the moon casts out the darkness of the encroaching night of Death.

The symbolism in Friedrich’s paintings is not the same as in traditional, Western religious art, in which a white lily would stand in as a collectively learned sign for Virgin purity, or a hovering dove would declare the presence of the Holy Spirit. Instead, the German artist sought an emotionally grounded revelation of Christian faith emerging from nature itself. Ordinary features of the natural landscape are deployed with an acutely descriptive sensitivity, their seamless accumulation creating a spiritual mood.

In part, the gravity of his pictures is accomplished through an extraordinarily precise technique. The moon in “A Walk at Dusk,” for instance, is a perfect disc; look closely and you’ll see the tiny hole made by the compass with which the circle was drawn.

First Friedrich sketched the landscape with pencil on a prepared canvas, then he elaborated the sketch in ink and finally he painted over the drawing in luminous glazes of oil. Atmospheric space is uncannily rendered. The misty little landscape seems to unfold slowly before your eyes, amplifying a subtle feeling of infinity. Friedrich often painted in a modest size, but his pictures are endowed with a monumental feel.

This is a distinctly different order of painting from anything that had come before, and it initially got Friedrich into trouble. Shortly after he began to paint in oils, in 1807, he completed a picture for the chapel of the castle of Count Thun, showing a crucifixion in near silhouette atop a pine-covered mountain, before a radiant sunrise. The first landscape painting ever designed as an altarpiece, “The Cross in the Mountains” caused a ruckus.

Its break with tradition was nothing short of radical. Conservative clerics were predictably appalled, with the Pat Robertsons and Donald Wildmons of the day feverishly charging the artist with blasphemy and sacrilege.

The development of a spiritual landscape motif may have been inadvertently hastened by Friedrich’s refusal to travel to Italy, which his friend and sometime mentor, the poet and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, so often encouraged him to do. Hardly a trace of Italian classicism is found in this most Germanic of German artists.

More likely, the motif arose from intensely personal convictions. The suggestion has even been made that the figure in the Getty’s painting is Friedrich himself. The picture is among his very last works, painted before a crippling stroke on Sept. 26, 1835, almost completely incapacitated the artist. In his late 50s and in poor health, he may have been contemplating his own mortality.

“A Walk at Dusk” is closely related to two other Friedrich paintings: the unfinished “Northern Lights,” formerly in Berlin’s National Gallery and tragically destroyed during World War II; and “Easter Morning,” acquired by the great Swiss collector Baron Thyssen in 1973. A single drawing, now housed in a Dresden museum, contains figure studies for all three pictures.

Long unknown, the Getty’s painting was discovered in 1965 in the attic of a German doctor, who sold it to the unidentified collector who subsequently placed the work at auction.

According to Getty conservator Mark Leonard, the picture is in generally excellent condition. A small tear in the canvas, located in the sky just above the trees in the upper right quadrant, needs repair but fortunately it is in a relatively inconspicuous portion of the image. A surface cleaning has been done, and a period frame will be found for the painting.

“A Walk at Dusk” is now one of just two Friedrichs in an American museum. (The even tinier “A Mountain Peak With Drifting Clouds,” from 1835, was acquired by Ft. Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum in 1984.) It’s a first-rate addition to the Getty’s increasingly distinguished collection.