As part of the Hermitage Days, from 29 November 2023, the Hermitage-Ural Centre will be holding the exhibition of a single masterpiece “Caspar David Friedrich. Riesengebirge”.
The year 2024 will be a round anniversary for Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). One of the foremost representatives of German Romantic painting, he is also a significant figure in the history of world art. Friedrich succeeded in making a landscape the mirror of his own perception of the world, to turn the details of a view into symbols of human feelings and philosophical concepts. A profound mystical-religious experience of nature and the introduction of the eternal world into the everyday makes the artist’s works akin to the poetry of Novalis and Ludwig Tieck, as well as the ideas of the philosopher Friedrich Schelling.
Friedrich’s studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen not only made him an attentive scrutinizer of nature, but also gave him an appreciation of the harsh northern countryside. Rather than the trip to Italy traditional for graduates of an art school, the painter gave preference to travelling around Germany. He wandered extensively through the country’s mountainous regions, as we are reminded by the Hermitage picture Morning in the Mountains, and took an interest in Gothic architecture (his sketches of the ruins of the Oybin Monastery formed the basis of the painting Dreamer, while the towers of Halle can be recognized in the background of Sisters). The island of Rügen became a favourite place of pilgrimage for him (impressions of sea journeys are reflected in On a Sailing Ship). In 1810, Friedrich set off on a journey around the Riesengebirge or Giant Mountains, where he made a large number of sketches from life that he was still using decades later. The Hermitage picture that bears the name of the range was, for example, painted around 1835 and is a collective image of the locality where the River Elbe rises. That is why it has the second title Memories of the Riesengebirge.
Friedrich settled in Dresden and achieved fame and popularity there. The artist was greatly aided by the favourable attitude taken towards him by Johann Wolfgang Goethe: the poet and authoritative critic praised the graphic compositions that the artist submitted for the exhibition-competition A Friend of Art and even approached him directly with a request to produce a series of depictions of clouds. In 1816 Friedrich became a member of the Dresden Academy of Arts and in 1824 a professor there. A group of artists formed around him who were were united by shared aesthetic and ideological conceptions: Gerhard von Kügelgen, Philipp Otto Runge, Carl Gustav Carus and Johan Dahl.
By the mid-1830s, however, Friedrich’s work had gone out of fashion in Germany, and after a stroke that befell him in 1835 the artist’s right arm remained partially paralysed. The family was spared complete financial ruin by the patronage of the Russian imperial court. The poet Vasily Zhukovsky, who acted as mentor to the heir to the throne, had become acquainted with Friedrich as far back as 1821 and a firm friendship developed between the two Romantics. Through Zhukovsky’s agency, the German artist’s works were purchased for the imperial residences, and after Friedrich’s death his widow received a comfortable pension. It is no coincidence that Russia is home to the best collection of Friedrich’s works outside of Germany. The State Hermitage possesses nine of his paintings and a series of sepia drawings.
The composition Riesengebirge or Memories of the Riesengebirge was not among the imperial purchases. It was acquired in 1835 by the Saxon Kunstverein (Art Society) in Dresden and then became the prize in a lottery, as a result of which the landscape came into the possession of the Russian art collector Piotr Durnovo. From his collection in 1925, the painting was transferred to the State Museum Fund and from there to the Hermitage.
The exhibition curator is Alexandra Konshakova, keeper of German 19th- and 20th-century paintings in the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art.
The exhibition of a single masterpiece from the State Hermitage Museum “Caspar David Friedrich. Riesengebirge” (0+) will run from 29 November 2023 to 24 March 2024 at the Hermitage-Ural Centre (11, Ulitsa Vainera, Yekaterinburg).
As part of the programme for the Hermitage Days in Yekaterinburg, on 30 November Alexandra Konshakova will be giving a lecture about Caspar David Friedrich.
The museum’s opening hours are Tuesdays to Sundays, 11:00 am to 8:00 pm (ticket office until 7:30), closed on Mondays. Tickets cost 300 roubles full price and 100 roubles for concessionary categories (pensioners, schoolchildren).
