Monday, April 29
75,000 tickets sold: Caspar David Friedrich remains a big hit at 250
The landmark show at Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie was organised to mark 250 years since the birth of Caspar David Friedrich – and the great painter of Romantic landscapes has proved remarkably popular after a quarter of a millennium. 75,000 tickets have been sold for the exhibition which is set to run until the beginning of August, with the museum has welcoming 20,000 visitors after just the first eight days and long queues forming outside.
Today, Caspar David Friedrich is regarded as one of the most important and influential German painters, but he died in relative obscurity. By the time of his death, his work was seen as eccentric and gloomy, representing a Romanticism that had already passed from fashion. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had supported the artists earlier works, famously said of his painting The Monk By The Sea that it “could be looked at standing on one’s head”.
For later generations of artists, however, it was precisely his epic, near-abstract and proto-modernist qualities which stood out. Today, his works are some of the most recognisable in art history, and the show at the Alte Nationalgalerie brings many of his most famous paintings to Berlin, with classics such The Ice Sea (1823/24) and Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818/1819) included among the more than 60 works on display.
