Drawing, graphic style, and colour: Caspar David Friedrich

It is ... always difficult to sort out a distinctive colour language at whatever stage of life or skill a man [an artist] stands, but when such a language does appear it is not an early phenomenon of an the owner’s work. He has always already perfected a graphic or formal frame for the later effulgence.  Oliver Jelly, An Essay on Eyesight. Hodder, 1963

When I first read the above passage, I had a tacit feeling that Oliver Jelly’s observation was sound, but I puzzled over the connection between well–grounded draughtsmanship and the development of a colour language. Yet I need not have worried. Cezanne sums it up perfectly:

Drawing and colour are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more the colour harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes.

And here is David Sweetman, writing in the Sunday Independent:

Those who best profited from the experience [of the major retrospective of Van Gogh’s work – 1901], notably Picasso and Matisse, truly understood Van Gogh’s achievement in restraining expressive colour with strong graphic  underpinning – he drew before he painted and continued to do so with colour, which is what holds together all those electric complementaries and explains why his works are still strong when reproduced in black and white. [Italics added]

Oliver Jelly’s use of the term ‘colour language’ may suggest a psychological dimension to the artist’s ‘colour predilections’; and there can be no doubt whatsoever that the artist’s choice of colours will relate to their fundamental temperament, which will run like a leitmotif through their works (even if barely discernible in some). The melancholy blues, greens, and yellows of Caspar David Friedrich are a paradigmatic example. Painters do not, and could not, choose their colour language. Certain painters, if given the palate of a Van Gogh or a Gauguin, would still find themselves muting the brighter reds and yellows, and producing a harmony on an altogether lower key. Neither do painters choose their graphic styles. Painter and style are inseparable, and style is never an adjunct, but a carrier of the painter’s meaning.

Caspar David Friedrich, On a Sailing Boat c. 1818

In the instance of Friedrich we are lucky in having an early painting – On a Sailing Boat c. 1818 – in which the attention given to drawing equals – if it does not surpass – the attention given to painting. It is immediately apparent from this painting that Friedrich is a fine draughtsman, and has therefore developed that strong graphic underpinning which both Jelly and Sweetman mark out as the necessary prerequisite of the development of a colour language.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Large Enclosure near Dresden c. 1832

Robert Rosenblum, in Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, writes: “[The] tragic mood of terrible loneliness and an almost menacing power was first explored by Friedrich in such a picture as The Large Enclosure near Dresden, where so much of the earth seems to expand with so infinite an extension that it actually produces a curvature ... [and, through emotional intensity, substitutes] perspectival accuracy for emotional authenticity.” The Northern Romantic Tradition encompasses such painters as Edvard Munch, Emile Nolde, and Franz Mark. And the word which perhaps best describes the underlying ‘malaise’ of this movement is angst. It can be found in playwrights such as Ibsen and Chekov; among philosophers it is found in Kierkegaard (and the mystic, Swedenborg); and in music you may hear and feel it in Sibelius. Angst differs from anxiety, in that that which causes this emotion cannot be courageously faced. If you feel angst in any situation, then the more you expose yourself to it the worse you will feel. I doubt there could now be anything like a northern Romantic tradition: the mystery that inspired it may still catch us unawares – and is ever in the background, as the irreducible enigma of the universe – but the knowledge and universal connection we now have has probably made it harder to sustain (though elements of it hover in the background of Nordic Noir.   

But I have strayed from the subject of Friedrich's colour language, and have to wonder if there ever was a yellow sky painted with such intensity, and to such evocative effect, as Friedrich's Neubrandenburg. Blue is almost entirely absent from this painting – except perhaps vestigially in the foreground shrubs and the coats of the two men. The green is subdued, and yet it is still Friedrich's. Compositionally, the painting is a masterpiece. The two men – typically with their backs to us, so that we are looking at them looking at the landscape: our gaze observing their gaze – form a perfect balance to the shrubbery on the left, as also an echo of the church steeple. The painting is suffused with atmosphere and rich colour – even though near monochromatic in comparison with a Matisse or a Bonnard. There is I think something entirely satisfying about it.

Caspar David Friedrich, Neubrandenburg. c. 1817

I had intended to write more about Friedrich, but have discovered that there is a richness and variety to his work that cannot be done justice to this most distinctive of painters in the space of a blog. So I am going to illustrate first a painting in which a yellow sky occupies almost the entire canvas, and then very briefly discuss a few more paintings illustrative of the solitary nature of our species – for all that we are gregarious and fun–loving. 

Caspar David Friedrich, Moonlight with Clouds. Oil on cardboard, 1824

Rosenblum, in Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, carries his argument across to America, and considers the paintings of Edward Hopper – where the urban scene often takes on an unsettling atmosphere: solitary people, and angst among the buildings (as might be expressed). Rosenblum concludes with Rothko, whose darker abstract expressionist works form a kind of antithesis to Friedrich's Moonlight with Clouds, and an echo to his Monk by the Sea. Edward Hopper, Railroad Sunset 1952

Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea. c. 1809

Rothko, Untitled