Friedrich and German Romanticism essays

Friedrich and German Romanticism essays The period of German Romanticism broke the individualist and rationalistic thinking of the Autklarung, advancing aesthetic ideals that transcended reason and exalted art. The flourishing of this period can be characterized in numerous ways, one of which is through a glimpse in the life of German Romantic artists such as the famous landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (see appendix 1). To a large extent, the content and abstraction of Friedrich's works mirror the Romanticist idealism in Germany during his time, as reflected in his compositions such as the allegorical oil paintings Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) and Stages of Life (1835) (see appendix 2 and 3). In these works, the artist took a great deal in transforming landscape paintings from objectivism to an intense and emotional depiction of man, nature and the metaphysical. Meanwhile, the dynamism of his life as an artist is as intense as his works of art. On one hand, he suffered from considerable criticisms and during his time, he was not able to gain the wide approval the public. On the other hand, he was also praised by many of his contemporaries in the Romantic Era due to his artistic, philosophical and aesthetic treatment of his works. In any case, he still remained as one of the most staple and distinguished figures of the Romantic Movement in Germany. This paper further examines on these contexts in the subsequent sections. A discussion on the artistry of Friedrich can begin no less than through a brief discussion on his biography. In essence, Friedrich had a life replete with both triumphs and adversities; his early life began in a series of tragedies and it ended with him being half-mad. Born on September 5, 1774, in Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania, on Germany's Baltic coast, Friedrich was the sixth out of the ten children, raised in a strictly Lutheran family (Collins). Unlike the trouble-free childhood experi...