Volume 38, Number 5 · March 7, 1991
Innerlichkeit and Eigentümlichkeit
By John Updike
The Romantic Vision of Caspar David Friedrich: Paintings and Drawings from the USSR 23–March 31, 1991
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York January
The Romantic Vision of Caspar David Friedrich: Paintings and Drawings from the USSR (paper, distributed by Abrams)
catalog of the exhibition by Robert Rosenblum, by Boris I. Asvarishch, edited by Sabine Rewald
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/The Art Institute of Chicago,, 110 pp., $22.50 (paper)
Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape
by Joseph Leo Koerner
Yale University Press, 256 pp., $50.00
The melting of the cold war, whose immediate global result seems to be the release of fresh energies of strife and destruction, has effected some benefits in the world of art, such as the Metropolitan Museum's present show of nine oil paintings and eleven works on paper by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), on loan from the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. The pictures were purchased over a period of twenty years beginning when the future Tsar Nicholas I, then the Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich, visited Friedrich's studio in Dresden. The visit was made at the urging of the grand duke's wife, Alexandra Fedorovna, daughter of Prussia's King Friedrich Wilhelm III, and his subsequent patronage was carried on through the intermediary offices of the poet Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky, Alexandra Fedorovna's tutor in Russian and an enthusiastic admirer of the painter Friedrich. Zhukovsky frequently visited Dresden, and at each visit sent back to the imperial family descriptions and recommendations which resulted in purchases, the last of them from Friedrich's impoverished widow in 1841.
Review, 2729 words
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