"Monk by the sea", Caspar David Friedrich

openDemocracy, 25 June 2007

Subjects:

Culture
arts & cultures
the small picture

Land, sea, sky and a solitary monk mark the height of German Romanticism

Monk by the Sea, (1809) Oil on canvas, 110 x 172 cm

Caspar David Friederich (b. 1774, Greifswald, d. 1840, Dresden)

Nationalgalerie, Berlin

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Comments

daniel.jeffreys

25 June 2007 - 8:48pm

This painting breaks down the sea and sky into two horizontal blocks, it really paves the way for abstraction and Mark Rothko's saturated rectangles. The figure is almost redundant- the state of transcendence is the artist's aim to be absorbed by the two great forces of sea and sky.