Academics From Germany

"Through the gloomy clouds break / Blue sky, sunshine, / On the heights and in the valley / Sing the lark and the nightingale God, I thank you that I live / Not forever in this world / Strengthen me that my soul rise / Upward toward your firmament."

"Alas, the blue arc of heaven / Is covered with gloomy clouds, / And the bright radiance of the sun / Is completely hidden See the terrifying force of the tempest / Bows the oaks so that is groans, / And the rose on the beautiful pasture / has ben bent down by the rain."

"I just stepped out of the dark, still forest and found myself on a rising hill. In front of me I saw a valley, surrounded by fertile hills, in which a town stood and the newly covered slate roof of the tower glowed in the evening light. Through the richly-flowered, carpeted meadow the river meandered.. .And behind the hills lay the mountains.. ..cliff after cliff rose far out into the horizon.. .Filled with soaring joy I stood there a long time and looked at the beautiful area.."

"If a painting has a soulful effect on the viewer, if it puts his mind into a soulful mood, then it has fulfilled the first requirement of a work of art. However bad it might be in drawing, color, handling, etc."

"The beauty, the spirit of Germany, its sun, moon, stars, rocks, seas and rivers can never be expressed this way.."

"Jesus Christ, nailed to the Cross [in his painting 'Cross in the Mountains (Tetschen Altar)',] is turned to the setting sun, here the image of the totally enlivening Father. With Christ dies the wisdom of the old world, the time when God the Father wandered directly on Earth. This sun set and the world was no longer able to apprehend the departed light. The evening glow shining from the pure noble metal of the golden crucified Christ is reflected in gentle glow to the earth. The Cross stands raised on a rock, unshakably firm, as our faith in Jesus Christ. Around the Cross stand the evergreens, enduring through all seasons, as does the belief of Man in Him, the crucified."

"I am far from wanting to resist the demands of my time, except when they are purely a matter of fashion. Instead, I continue to hope that time itself will destroy its own offspring, perhaps quite soon. But I am not so weak as to submit to the demands of the age when they go against my convictions. I spin a cocoon around myself; let others do the same. I shall leave it up to time to show what will come of it: a brilliant butterfly or a maggot."

"People say of such-and-such a painter that he has great command of his brush. Might it not be more correct to say that he is controlled of his brush? Merely for the satisfaction of his vanity, to paint brilliantly and display skill with the brush, he has sacrificed the nobler considerations of naturalness and truth – and thus achieved sorry fame as a brilliant technician."

"In this big moonlit landscape by the painter N.N., that deservedly celebrated technician, one sees more than one would wish, or that can actually be seen by moonlight. But what the perceptive, sensitive soul looks for in every painting, and rightly expects to find, is missing.. ..If that painter could find it in himself to paint fewer, but more deeply-felt, pictures instead of so many clever ones, his contemporaries and posterity would be more grateful to him."

"To many it is incomprehensible that art has to emerge from a person's inner being, 'that it has to do with one's morality, one's religion..'. But so it does. You should trade only in what you recognize to be true and beautiful, noble and good in your soul."

"When not converging on literally nothing, his pictorial schemes address objects that are either remote, like the moon, or obdurate, like the battered oak. Human figures intercept our gaze and transmit it into ineffable distance. The pictures don't give; they take. Something is drawn out of us with a harrowing effect, which Friedrich's use of color nudges toward intoxication. What at first seem to be mere tints in a tonal range combust into distinctly scented, disembodied hues: drenching purples and scratchy russets, plum."

"Friedrich empties his canvas in order to imagine, through an invocation of the void, an infinite, unrepresentable God."

"It is significant, as William Vaughan remarks in his introduction to Borsch-Supan's catalogue, that churches never appear in Friedrich's work except in the distance, as unreal visions, or as ruins. The visible Church is dead, only the invisible Church, in the heart or revealed through Nature, is alive. This is part of Friedrich's Pietist heritage, a personal religion that refuses all outward forms, all doctrine. To put a landscape on an altar is an aggressive act, as destructive of the old forms as it is creative of a new sensibility."

"How does Friedrich persuade us, again and again, that we are at the very edge of the natural world, ready at last to immerse ourselves in something that, for want of a better word, must be called the supernatural – a domain of the mystical speculation about human life and afterlife that before the Romantics found a proper home in the church?"

"To see any of Friedrich's paintings as simply nationalist is, however, mistaken. His paintings are not celebrations of German mysticism so much as examinations of it. Friedrich uses the emptiness of the Baltic shore and the Thuringian forest to suggest the hubris of empire. He is not the prophet of German territorial ambition but its satirist. Friedrich's theme is the unconquerability of space. Human beings are tiny interlopers in a world they can never hope to rule. He exposes authority - of the monarchical states, Prussia and the rest, from which German liberals felt so alienated."

"He never made the obligatory journey south to study in Rome; his subject matter was the foggy and precipitous vista, sublimely expansive and filled with premonitory brooding. The writer Ludwig Tieck believed Friedrich was the Nordic genius incarnate, whose mission was "to express and suggest most sensitively the solemn sadness and religious stimulus which seem recently to be reviving our German world in a strange way." Friedrich's work, the Dresden painter Ludwig Richter remarked in 1825, does not deal with "the spirit and importance of nature.. ..Friedrich chains us to an abstract idea, using the forms of nature in a purely allegorical manner, as signs and hieroglyphs.""

"Whenever a storm with thunder and lightning moved over the sea, he would hurry out to the top of the cliffs as if he had a pact of friendship with the forces of nature, or even went on into the oakwood where the lightning had split a tall tree from top to bottom, which led him to murmur: 'How great, how mighty, how wonderful!' Thus a friend remembered the wanderings of Caspar David Friedrich as a young painter on the Baltic island of Rugen in 1802. It was Friedrich's favorite posture: Homo romanticus out in the weather, saluting the crag."

"The revolutionaire and seaport scenes of Lorrain [French painter Claude Lorrain, strongly admired by Friedrich] contain many artistic principles which form an important part of Friedrich’s style: melting distances where water and sky merge as one, the portrayal of a dreamlike unreal world beyond, seascapes in which early morning light dissolves into mist which engulfs ships that appear as mysterious aspparations, magically floating in fluid ether. The assumtion that Friedrich is an isolated figure in the history of art is not correct."

"Here is a man who has discovered the tragedy of landscape."

"[Friedrich] worked in the frigid technique of his time, which could hardly inspire a school of modern painting.."

"Friedrich is recognized today as the supreme German painter of the Romantic era, but in his own time his genius was not so widely acknowledged. This was not because the aims of his art were foreign to the interests of his generation. On the contrary, his allusions to the spiritual in nature, his close study of the local landscape, and his emphasis on the need for inspiration were all commonplace preoccupations of the period. His art was undervalued because it explored these areas with a new uncompromising vision that was too personal and original to be easily grasped."

"He [Friedrich] was indeed a strange mixture of temperament, his moods ranging from the gravest seriousness to the gayest humor.. ..But anyone who knew only this side of Friedrich's personality, namely his deep melancholic seriousness, only knew half the man. I have met few people who have such a gift for telling jokes and such a sense of fun as he did, providing that he was in the company of people he liked."

"Artists and connoisseurs saw in Friedrich's art only a kind of mystic, because they themselves were only looking out for the mystic.. ..They did not see Friedrich's faithful and conscientious study of nature in everything he represented."

"What a picture of death this landscape is!.. ..one shudders when looking at it."

"This picture [ 'Man and Woman contemplating the Moon',] full of sentiment and the quietness of nature, was painted by Friedrich in 1819 and he gave it to me in exchange for one of my own works. Friedrich had to copy it several times, but he did not approve of this, hence others copied it as well. Only the deserved destination for the picture, the Royal Picture Gallery, could convince me to part with it."

"From time to time I see the painter Friedrich here. He has started a large landscape [the painting 'Cemetery at Dusk'].. .A large iron gate, which leds into a cemetery, stand open; by the gate, leaning on one of his posts and partly covered by its shadow, a man and a woman can be seen.. ..who have just buried their child and in the night are looking at its grave.. ..it is just a little grass mound, besides which one can see a spade, Streaks of mist lie over the cemetery, they hide the tree trunks from sight so that they seem detached from the ground. One can make out other graves through the misty veil, and, above all, natural monuments[!]; an upright stone looks like a grey ghost."

"He never made sketches, cartoons, or color studies for his paintings, because he stated (and certainly he was not entirely wrong), that such aids chill the imagination somewhat. He did not begin to paint an image until it stood, living, in the presence of his soul.."

"In landscape it was Friedrich above all whose profound and vigorous mind, with total originality, laid hold of this tangle of banality, staleness, and tedium and—cutting through it with a mordant melancholy — raised from its midst a distinctively new and radiant poetic tendency."

"Friedrich, with his somewhat stiff and diffuse but highly poetic manner, was the first artist — in painting as a whole, but more especially in landscape painting — who ever assailed and shook up the philistines of Dresden. There had been a great stir when one of his paintings, a crucifix on a rock beneath dark fir trees and against the dying glow of an evening sky, had given rise to a literary controversy conducted on Friedrich's behalf by his friend Gerhard von Kügelchen [Kügelgen] and on the opposing side by a prosaic dilettante, a certain Herr von Ramdohr — to the latter's eventual discomfiture."

"Friedrich's written commentary on aesthetics was limited to a collection of aphorisms set down in 1830, in which he explained the need for the artist to match natural observation with an introspective scrutiny of his own personality."

"Friedrich has now given a task: someone wants to have two pictures - one representing an Italian landscape in all its luxuriant magnificent beauty, the other - the awe inspiring nature of the north. It is the second that Friedrich has undertaken to paint; he does not know what it will be. He is waiting for the moment of inspiration, which frequently comes to him, as he told me, in a dream."

"..northerly Ossianic nature reflected the icy air and the chalck-cliffed coasts of the Baltic Sea where he was brought up."

"Even the things most necessary to painting - the box of paints, the bottles of linseed oil, and the oil-rag - were moved to the adjoining room, because Frederick [Friedrich] was of the opinion that any objects would disturb his inner world of imagination.."

"LADY: Oh, I felt so at home in front of the picture, it truly touched me. It is truly lifelike, and when you were talking like that, it was all hazy, just like when I went for a walk beside the sea with our philosophical friends. I only wish that a fresh sea breeze was blowing and a sail was coming in, and that there was a glint of sunlight and the water was lapping. As it is, it's like a dream, having a nightmare or feeling homesick — let's move on, it's making me feel sad."

"A TALL, FORBEARING MAN: I am glad that there is still one landscape painter who pays attention to the strange conjunctures of the seasons and the sky, which produce the most striking effects in even the poorest regions. True, I would prefer it if he also had the gift and the technique to represent it truthfully; in this respect he is as far inferior to some of the Dutch School who have painted subjects similar to this as he is their superior in his overall approach."

"[Friedrich] ignores the use of light [and] does not strive to adjust his colors to one another or to create a harmony.. ..[but his pictures were] thought-out inventions.."

"FIRST GENTLEMAN: Magnificent, certainly, you are right. (to the Lady) But, my dear, you have not said a word."

"SECOND GENTLEMAN: [the monk].. ..he does predict the weather, he is the one within the wholeness, the lonely center in the lonely circle."

"FIRST GENTLEMAN: Yes, he is the soul, the heart, the whole picture's reflection in itself and on itself."

"GENTLEMAN: Magnificent, magnificent! This is the only artist who expresses a soul in his landscapes. There is a great individuality in this picture, high truth, solitude, the overcast, melancholy sky — he knows what he’s painting all right."

"SECOND GENTLEMAN: And he also paints what he knows, and feels it, and thinks it, and paints it."

"People are always talking about 'incidentals'; but nothing is incidental in a picture, everything is indispensable to the whole effect, so nothing must be neglected. If a man can give value to the main part of his composition only by negligent treatment of the subordinate portions, his work is in a bad way. Everything must and can be carefully executed, without the different parts obtruding themselves on the eye. The proper subordination of the parts to the whole is not achieved by neglecting incidental features, but by correct grouping and by the distribution of light and shadow."

"The isolation of Friedrich's back-view figures [in his pictures] underscores their importance. They are alone, solitary, in pairs or in a small group, in a natural setting. They are aliens in the elementary coordinate system of nature. One always feels that they have only just now entered the painting, to pause for a long moment and then go on."

"GOVERNESS: Why did he paint nothing but dull skies? How lovely it would be if he had painted some men gathering amber on the seashore."

"FIRST YOUNG LADY: Oh yes, I'd like to fish for a nice amber necklace for myself."

"SECOND GENTLEMAN: How divinely the figure is chosen, it is not merely a device to show the height of the other objects, as in the work of the common run of painters. He is the subject itself, he is the picture; and as he seems to dream himself into this setting, as if into a sad mirror of his isolation, so the ship-less, enclosing sea, which binds him like a vow,"

"We visited Friedrich's atelier today. Listening to him and seeing his paintings was wonderful. He has some bonhomie which pleases people and his paintings reveal his romantic imagination. As a rule, he expresses in them one thought or feeling, though vaguely. You may meditate over his paintings but not have a clear understanding of them, for they are vague even in his soul. They are dreams or daydreams. He often employs very simple natural things, such as an ice block floating on sea waves, a few trees in a dale, window of his room (facing the beautiful Elbe), knight meditating over ruins or tombstones, monk staring into the distance or below his feet: all this captivates your soul, plunges you into dreams, all invokes your imagination, powerfully though vaguely."

"Es handelt sich um meinen liebsten Jugendtraum, nämlich um den Nachweis, dass die Abel’schen Gleichungen mit Quadratwurzeln rationaler Zahlen durch die Transformations-Gleichungen elliptischer Functionen mit singularen Moduln grade so erschöpft werden, wie die ganzzahligen Abel’schen Gleichungen durch die Kreisteilungsgleichungen."

"Now it is time for us to realize that, in his Grundzüge, Kronecker did not merely intend to give his own treatment of the basic problems of ideal-theory which form the main subject of Dedekind's life-work. His aim was a higher own. He was, in fact, attempting to describe and to initiate a new branch of mathematics, which would contain both number-theory and algebraic geometry as special cases. This grandiose conception has been allowed to fade out of our sight, partly because of the intrinsic difficulties of carrying it out, partly owing to historical accidents and to the temporary successes of the partisans of purity and of Dedekind. It will be the main purpose of this lecture to try to rescue it from oblivion, to revive it, and to describe the few modern results which may be considered as belonging to the Kroneckerian program."

"The peace that passeth understanding is that which comes when the pain is not relieved, which subsists in the midst of the painful situation, suffusing it, which springs out of the pain itself, which shimmers on the crest of the wave of pain, which is the spear of frustration transfigured into the shaft of light. It is upon those we love that we must anchor ourselves spiritually in the last moments. The sense of interconnectedness with them stands out vividly by way of contrast at the very moment when our mortal connection with them is about to be dissolved. And the intertwining of our life with theirs, the living in the life that is in them, is but a part of our living in the infinite manifold of the spiritual life. The thought of this, as apprehended, not in terms of knowledge, but in immediate experience, begets the peace that passeth understanding. And it is upon the bosom of that peace that we can pass safely out of the realm of time and space."