THE MAGIC OF SILENCE

An art historian documents the achievement of one of Germany’s most important painters.

Historian Illies writes in this admiring biography that Friedrich (1774-1840) was “the most famous German painter of the nineteenth century” yet suffered an inexplicable “descent into oblivion.” Many factors influenced that decline in interest in this painter of allegorical landscapes who “inhaled nature to exhale it again as art.” Illies alternates between stories of Friedrich’s personal life and the creation of his works. He divides the book into sections dedicated to the four classical elements—fire, water, earth, and air—that inspired Friedrich’s paintings or affected their fate, as when a blaze at the home of Princess Mathilde of Saxony destroyed two inherited Friedrichs, Morning in the Mountains and Mountain Scene in Evening Light. The book shows the influence Friedrich had on other artists, from Samuel Beckett, who had a “prototypical experience” that inspired Waiting for Godot after he viewed Friedrich’s landscapes, to Kurt Vonnegut, who was in prison during the Dresden bombing of World War II and later had his character Billy Pilgrim describe “the sunsets over the destroyed city as if they were skies by Caspar David Friedrich” in Slaughterhouse-Five. Sometimes, Illies sledgehammers square pegs into round holes and forces events to fit this arrangement, as when, in the water section, he writes of the Nazis’ efforts to embrace Friedrich as “a stout, seaworthy Teuton who would stand in the bow during their misguided expeditions to come.” Most of the book, however, is more restrained. Sprinkled throughout are amusing if unnerving anecdotes, such as the one about Walt Disney’s 1935 trip to Munich to see a compilation of his work titled In the Realm of Mickey Mouse. “The Nazis allowed the glorification of other rulers,” Illies writes, “as long as they were mice.”

A welcome appreciation of the greatest painter of German Romanticism.