When I view this image on my laptop and flip the screen back a few degrees, I see something that looks like the negative of a photograph. The trunk and branches of the tree become silvery and flat, as do the foreground rocks and the figures. All these flat shapes are limned by dark lines — the reverse of the delicate nimbus of light surrounding them in the original. Stranger still, color is drained from the image, except at the center, where the waxing moon turns toxic orange, filling the patch of sky around it with a sulfurous glow.
This phenomenon is obviously just a bug of digital screens. But it caught my attention because the painting, by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), focuses on a moon, which has light values that are reversed every half-month.
Friedrich’s reputation has undergone similar repeated reversals. The leading painter of German Romanticism, he is best known for his paintings of figures seen from behind looking out at landscapes, seascapes, ruins, forests and church spires. Taut and fastidious, his works tremble with freshly felt significance.
This painting, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of only a few Friedrichs in America. The third of three versions of the same subject, it shows Friedrich, at right, and his friend and disciple August Heinrich gazing out from a steep hillside at a waxing moon, with Venus visible beside it.
A lot of the waywardness in people’s responses to Friedrich is a product of moral hindsight: Germany’s great nationalist painter, a favorite of Adolf Hitler (though working a century before Hitler, when Germany was not yet a nation), was bound to be seen differently in the wake of Nazism.
But the inconsistency in Friedrich’s reception is also a phenomenon of Romanticism itself. As a movement, Romanticism was always involved in forms of negation (of political structures, of custom, of community) in favor of things freshly perceived, or the recollection of those things (Friedrich was not a plein-air painter). That freshness of apprehension, and the intensity of its recollection, made the experiences themselves destabilizing.
A devout Protestant, Friedrich was a distant heir, as Joseph Koerner writes in the afterword to his celebrated book on the artist, “to the iconoclasts of the Reformation, who vilified church pictures as wasteful, scandalous idols that had to be eliminated from religion.” Friedrich’s idea was to transform landscape into a new kind of religious iconography. But his works’ meanings remained elusive, and he wasn’t as programmatic with his symbols as he is sometimes taken to be. Yes, the waxing moon symbolized Jesus and the promise of rebirth. But the artist also associated moonlight with contemplation and friendship, and that wasn’t the end of it.
Elusiveness inheres, of course, in our feelings before nature, which can seem pregnant with significance even as its actual meanings remain just out of reach. Describing aspects of nature’s beauty in his poem “The Meadow,” the German philosopher-poet Novalis — a founding figure of German Romanticism — ended each stanza with the same refrain: “Yet what this was, or what befell,/ I do not know, I cannot tell.”
Novalis believed that art and romanticism were basically synonymous. “Insofar as I render a higher meaning to what is ordinary, a mysterious appearance to what is customary, an infinite look to the finite,” he wrote, “I am romanticizing.”
Today, alienated from a natural world we have ruthlessly desecrated, we find it harder than ever to “romanticize.” In fact, when I tipped my screen back and saw how the image of this painting flipped into a negative, I thought of the moon as a source not of meaning but of deception. Sometimes light, sometimes dark, it is neither a disk nor a sickle nor a piece of cheese nor a sign of rebirth and love. It doesn’t generate its own light. It is merely a ball of rock reflecting the light of a burning star.
Isn’t art also like this — a secondhand phenomenon, borrowing light and energy from other sources and always leading us astray? It is only when the image flips, when reality goes into reverse, that we sense how delicate and friable — and how compulsively romantic — are our constructions of reality.
