Casper David Friedrich

 During our recent trip to Berlin, we got tickets to a special exhibit on the artist Casper David Friedrich, who was an important romantic painter in Germany. The exhibit was in the Altes Nationalgalerie on museum island in Berlin, which is a beautiful place simply to hang out. But our tickets were for 9 a.m., so our sightseeing had to wait.

Casper David Friedrich was born on September 5, 1774, and died on May 7, 1840. Although he is best known for his allegorical landscapes, you will not find the landscapes anywhere in nature. Friedrich used landscapes but changed them to create a mood, which often created an emotional connection with the viewer rather than a more literal interaction with the scene. This differentiated him from British and French Romanticists, who tended to emphasize more nostalgic or bucolic landscapes, and man's desire to conquer nature, respectively. The German approach depicts man's attempt to understand nature and, by extension, the divine. 

The first paintings in the exhibit were two "pendent" paintings. The one of the left was The Monk on the Shore, and the one on the right was Monastery Cemetery in Snow.

 

The Monk on the Shore

 

Monastery Cemetery in Snow

The paintings really need to be seen in person. It is hard to see the various scales in one photo. In the Monastery Cemetery in Snow, the large scale of the trees and the monastery ruin both draw the eye upward from the small-scale monks walking into the ruin. An abbey ruin exists in Friedrich's home town in Greifswald, but Friedrich painted his ruin stretched upward, with the window in the apse much narrower than the window in the real ruin.

Eldena Abbey ruin in Greifswald

You have get close to see the detail in the monks. And when you do, you see that the line of monks is led by a small group carrying a casket to a cross. And it is very easy to miss the date on the headstone on the right side of the painting. The year says 1812, the year Dresden (Friedrich's home at the time) was occupied by Napoleon's dreaded troops.

 

Detail of the monks

Detail of tomb stones

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Now return to the left-hand painting. The Monk on the Shore is an empty expanse of sea and clouds, with a single monk, his back to us, viewing it as we do. Friedrich drew on his painting first with chalk or lead pencil, and this can be seen with an infrared reflectogram (also shown at the exhibit). An infrared reflectogram of The Monk on the Shore shows that Friedrich originally intended to have ships in the painting. But Friedrich painted over the ships, leaving the painting simple and empty with horizontal lines. And so the monk faces into the abyss. 

 

Infrared reflectogram of Monk on the Sea

This integration of spiritual significance with landscape painting made him a popular success.

Friedrich often put people in his painting. Sometimes it was a solitary figure turned away from the viewer, towards and in communion with the landscape. This kind of figure is known as "ruckenfigur," is another way German Romanticism differentiates itself from British and French Romanticism. In Woman at a Window, the woman is looking out the window, presumably at ships. But her view is different than our view, and we can only see the masts of the ships.

Woman at the Window

The Benin Bronzes

 We were in Berlin last week. The Benin bronzes consist of thousands of sculptures and plaques that British forces looted from Benin City, in what is now southern Nigeria, during a raid in 1897. Many wound up in museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York; the British Museum, in London; and several major German institutions.

 "To you here in Nigeria, this loss has been your reality for your whole life," Baerbock said at Tuesday's official handover ceremony. "Today we are here to return the Benin Bronzes to where they belong — to the people of Nigeria. We are here to right a wrong."

 

Germany's Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock (second from left), and Nigeria's Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed (fourth from left), are pictured during the ceremony

Nigeria has been calling for the objects’ return for several decades, and its deal with Germany is the largest yet. It is also notable because the effort was spearheaded not by individual museums, but by a national government.

A pavilion to store and display the treasures is being built in Benin City and will most likely be completed in 2023. The building will be next to the planned Edo Museum of West African Art, an ambitious institution designed by the acclaimed Ghanaian British architect David Adjaye.

The about-face was driven — as interviews with eight German and Nigerian officials showed — by a changing social consensus about the ethics of holding on to such items, and further strengthened by a backlash against Germany’s flagship cultural project: the Humboldt Forum, an $825 million institution in Berlin, conceived as Germany’s equivalent to the Louvre or the British Museum.

Germany’s approach also contrasts with those of the United States and British governments, which have left decisions up to individual institutions. Some organizations, including the Smithsonian Institution, have acted alone. Last month, the Horniman Museum, in London, held a ceremony to transfer ownership of 72 objects, including bronzes, to Nigeria’s government

According to Andreas Görgen, the secretary general of Germany’s Federal Culture Ministry and one of the architects of the restitution agreement, the deal was also a testament to a careful, incremental strategy, which he contrasted with a flashier approach from France.
“Macron took the very French route: a great speech by a great president, then it takes years for reality to match those words,” Görgen said. “We are operating in a German way,” he said. “It isn’t especially sexy, but it can be efficient.” The French effort has floundered, in part, because museum objects are property of the French state, meaning Parliament must sign off on transfers of ownership.

Germany’s federal and state culture ministers convened in March of 2019 to approve guidelines for handling museum items from “colonial contexts.” The agreement stipulated that all objects that had been obtained “unethically” would be liable for return and directed institutions to facilitate claims by producing publicly available inventories.

Görgen, the culture ministry official, said the announcement of the museum plans in late 2020 helped eradicate any remaining doubts in Germany. After several rounds of negotiations in the spring of 2021, Germany and Nigeria signed a “memorandum of understanding,” and then the official agreement in July 2022. The agreement was finalized weeks ahead of the opening of the Humboldt Forum’s ethnological exhibits.

Visitors to the Humboldt Forum can still view several dozen Benin Bronzes, accompanied by signage clarifying that the objects belong to Nigeria. According to Parzinger, the agreement allows for 168 pieces chosen by Nigeria’s museum commission to remain in Germany “so that Benin’s art can be shown to the world.” The approximately 350 other bronzes that were part of the Berlin museum collections will be transported to Nigeria once the pavilion is completed.