Caspar David Friedrich, The Abbey in the Oakwood, 1808-10

Caspar David Friedrich, The Abbey in the Oakdwood, 1808-1810, oil on canvas, 110.4 x 171 cm. (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin)

We're in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin

and we're looking at a Caspar David Friedrich's

The Abbey in the Oakwood.

It's a large painting, and it was one of a pair

that included "The Monk by the Sea."

This is a very somber image and it really is

a perfect example of the way Friedrich used landscape

in order to represent issues of human life and

of the Divine.

That's right, and in this painting we see

the ruins of an abbey, an old abbey

and a procession of figures entering this ruined abbey,

carrying a coffin.

And so immediately we have a sense of the passage of time,

of the transience of human existence...

We're also looking at, it seems, the dead of winter,

and perhaps it's sunset.

If you look at the remnant of architecture that's left

you have this, first of all, this very forlorn sense

from the ruins themselves.

You see this old lancet window that's fallen into disrepair.

No glass remains.

And you have a real sense of the grandeur of

the original space, but now what's left is just

the futility of human experience, the futility of human effort.

And what we see is that nature is eternal, but what man

creates is transient.

You have the monks themselves going through their

ancient ritual of burial.

But you see the cemetery that surrounds them in the snow

is not well tended, it's haphazard, and it seems to be, itself,

falling into disrepair.

The abbey refers back to the Medieval tradition, but that's

now fallen away.

Older than that, are the oak trees,

which might have represented, for Friedrich,

the Druidic traditions, the pre-Christian traditions,

these truly ancient oaks, gnarled, and terrifying

in their silhouettes, but that speak of a tradition,

as witnesses, that are even older than Christianity.

And then beyond that, the crescent moon, and the sky,

when you were speaking, that's the nature that I was

looking at that is permanent,

that is trans-historical, that moves beyond even

the growth and death of the trees.

Certainly of the architecture of Man's efforts.

The moon having no sense of the cosmos, even beyond

the seasons of the Earth.

That's right, and so you have this sense of human time,

you have this sense of nature's time,

and then you have this sense of the time of God's space.

And in fact, if there's any optimism in this image,

it is that moon.

It is the faintest crescent, and it might wane even more

and become a New Moon, but then it will regenerate

and there is this possibility for rebirth.

You mentioned that it's the dead of winter,

but spring will come.

And so even if it seems quite distant now, in this sort of

bleak twilight, there is this sense that there will be renewal.

So we may have a suggestion of resurrection

in the cycles of the moon, we have the crosses that are

a part of the cemetery, we have the cross that forms part of

the ruin of the abbey, and that suggestion of resurrection.

I think what's so interesting about Friedrich is that

he's imbuing a landscape with this very,

very serious meaning, almost the way that, in the past,

people have looked to the iconography of

Christian paintings, Friedrich is looking for modern language

with which to express these trans-historical human feelings,

contemplating our role in the universe, and trying to make

sense of all those layers of time that you referred to before.

That's exactly right. Friedrich is finding a new way of

representing these eternal issues, and it makes sense that

he would have to, because this is now the beginning of the

19th century. Friedrich is now living in a rational culture,

and the idea of using the iconography of the Renaissance,

or even of the Baroque, would feel implausible.

It wouldn't make sense.

And so Friedrich, this artist who was trained in Copenhagen,

who grew up in Greifswald, which was then part of Sweden,

on the Southern coast of the Baltic,

is looking towards the very extreme, cold

Northern lanscape, as a way of expressing

these ideas of the eternal.