“How? one asks; three colors and two lines. Is that a landscape?” Thus a reviewer of the Berlin exhibition in 1832 expressed his doubts on viewing a Friedrich painting. (1) He was probably referring to our very painting, as Werner Sumowski already suspected. (2) The reduction of landscape to a few basic geometric elements such as lines, hemispheres, and triangles must have seemed strange at the time. The silhouette of the mountains enters the image from the left in the form of large wedges. On the horizon, a slightly elevated mountain peak in the form of a rounded-off cone marks the final point of the mountain chain. That led the reviewer of the time to the bold remark that what “emerges from the image” is ultimately the “abstraction of the artist himself; his choice,“ and not the “view of a piece of sky, a stretch of hills and valleys!“ seen with one’s eyes in situ. (3)

The result of this Romantic minimalism is an almost archaic landscape, as if from before the Anthropocene: no one is seen in the image, hardly any trace of human civilization can be spotted. The foreground is taken up entirely by a green, damp, lush meadow, which could equally well be a pristine moor. Only on closer inspection is a luminous yellow wheatfield made visible further back, at the right end of the valley. That is the only human trace.

In Friedrich’s paintings, however, color is just as decisive as composition; it was applied fluidly, as in a watercolor. This enables the tones to develop into a finely tuned keyboard that transitions from the bright green of the foreground by way of the yellow of the wheatfield into the blue, and then the gray of the mountains. Finally, the landscape is vaulted by a sky with the shimmering gray cumulus clouds that are so typical of Friedrich. Behind them is an almost imperceptible sunlight, whose precise point of departure cannot be determined.

But where did Friedrich place this landscape? The Giant Mountains, where Friedrich hiked, have been proposed, (4) but, recently, also a landscape in Bohemia around Mount Klič. (5) For Friedrich, what was important in the end was only that an image be “felt” and not whether it was “invented.” (6) It is always the images of nature, and not the act of observing nature itself, that trigger this process in the viewer. (7)

Kilian Heck, in: exh. cat. Hamburg 2023, p. 264.

(1) Scholl 1833, p. 61, also cited in Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, p. 119, and Richter 2021–22, vol. 2, p. 172.
(2) Ibid.
(3) See note 1.
(4) Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, pp. 381–83, no. 304.
(5) Richter 2021–22, vol. 2, p. 172.
(6) Grave 2023, p. 173.
(7) Ibid., p. 183.