Y – YOUNG'S NIGHT THOUGHTS

"Nothing can be sadder or more unsettling than this position in the world: the only spark of life in the vast realm of death, the solitary center in the solitary circle. The picture, with its two or three mysterious objects, lies there like the Apocalypse, as if it had Young's Night Thoughts, and since in its uniformity and boundlessness it has nothing but the frame for a foreground, it is as if one's eyelids had been cut off."* Heinrich von Kleist’s lines on Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (c. 1808–1810) have become almost as famous as the painting itself. [...]

With Monk by the Sea, Friedrich, as Kleist recognized, had "undoubtedly broken entirely new ground in the field of his art," which was to extend far into the 20th century. In the mid-1970s, the American art historian Robert Rosenblum thus traced a line of tradition ranging from Friedrich's "darkly luminous void" to the formally reduced abstractions of American painters such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko and to Georgia O'Keeffe's archetypal landscape motifs.**

An excerpt from Barbara Hess’ Caspar David Friedrich A–Z

*Quoted from: Heinrich von Kleist, Clemens Brentano, and Achim von Arnim, "Verschiedene Empfindungen vor einer Seelandschaft von Friedrich, worauf ein Kapuziner," in: Berliner Abendblätter, October 13, 1810, reprinted in: Werner Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich. Naturwirklichkeit und Kunstwahrheit, Munich 2000, p. 282.
**Quoted from: Robert Rosenblum, The Modern Painting and the Tradition of Romanticism. From C. D. Friedrich to Mark Rothko [1975], translated from American by Reinhard Kaiser, Munich 1981, p. 11; p. 218, Fig. 303.
Image credit: Caspar David Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea, c. 1808–1810, oil on canvas, 110 x 171.5 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin