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

Drawing a line

All good drawing – with the exception of that done from memory – should be explorative. In other words, an exercise in close looking. Watch a serious artist drawing, and you will see that the time devoted to looking will in all probability be greater than that devoted to drawing. Further – given the difficulty of accurately holding in your mind what you have observed – one minute is too long to spend on the drawing. Watch students making drawings of art works in galleries, and you will see that many of them spend far more time ‘drawing’ that they do looking at their subject. I have seen a student spend four to five minutes drawing without so much as a glance at the painting she was supposed to be learning from. What was she doing? In all probability she was trying to make her drawing look good or nice according to some preconceived notion of what it is that constitutes a good drawing. Manifestly she was wasting her time, and learning nothing.

None of the above is to say that drawing is not selective. It has to be: otherwise it will be deadened by minutiae; choked by detail. The salient features are what matter, and in some drawings nothing is included except lines, which in the hands of a fine draughtsman will indicate form without the use of shading (our minds being well equipped to supply what is excluded). The Rembrandt drawing illustrated below is one of the finest examples of the expressiveness of line, as well as being a drawing of exquisite delight.

Rembrandt. Two Women Teaching a Child to Walk.
Red chalk. C. 1640 

Some time ago, thinking how essential it is to pay the closest attention to the subject of a drawing, I tried an experiment in looking and drawing simultaneously. A near impossibility, as I supposed, and yet it turned out to be not quite that. It was possible because, although I did not stop my hand from moving, I looked rapidly between the subject and the drawing, and I can remember how the two tended to meld as I worked. However, if this gives rise to the thought that the result was somehow a facsimile or copy of what was in front of me, then nothing could be further from the truth (as is evident from the drawing in question, Dead plane leaves, illustrated below). What the eyes see, and the imaginative mind comprehends, is transformed by hand, wrist, and arm into something that is different from the subject of the drawing, while retaining its integral form. (I hope that that does not sound pretentious, but I cannot find a better way of describing the process whereby a thing in the world becomes a drawing on paper.)

Dead Plane Leaves, Conte crayon and pen and ink 

There is then the question of ‘movement’ in a drawing, which – even when related to  physical movement in the world – remains inherently static as a graphic representation (or interpretation) on the flat surface of paper. Dead Plane Leaves has movement, even though it was drawn indoors, and completely undisturbed by wind or draught. So it is that the movement is integral to the lines; and the carefulness with which they were drawn seems only to have enhanced their liveliness. This seems paradoxical; but only if we persist in believing that the achievement of movement in a drawing can only come about as a result of free and fast drawing. (It can if you are a Picasso, but such are in short supply!)

This brings me to Ruskin, and a passage from The Cestus of Aglaia. He writes:

All freedom is error. Every line you lay down is either right or wrong ... If right, it most assuredly is not a ‘free’ line, but an intensely continent, restrained, and considered line; and the action of the hand in laying it is just as ‘free’ as the hand of a first–rate surgeon in a critical incision. [Chapter IV, §72]

This is of course highly prescriptive and persuasive, and we might wonder if any artist not possessed of the genius of a Raphael could ever lay down a ‘right’ line. Yet if Ruskin sets the bar too high, it remains true that any artist who sets out to make their drawing look ‘good’ rather than truly explorative, then they are not drawing. “Take the commonest, closest, most familiar thing, and strive to draw it verily as you see it. Be sure of this last fact, for otherwise you will find yourself continually drawing not what you see, but what you know.” It happens from time to time that an artist develops a ‘technique’ or a ‘way of doing things’ that charms and fools a great many people. Yet, look at such works with a critical eye and they will fall apart in front of you: just like a spent firework falling out of the sky!