Friedrich

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani presents Friedrich as the greatest painter of German Romanticism and nearly always dwells on the same painting, Two Men Contemplating the Moon, noting that several versions exist, one of them with a man and a woman1. He makes it the antithesis of Poussin: against the classical landscape he sets a nocturne in which moonlight erases the details and the figures do not inhabit the place23. He sees in it landscape in the modern sense: night, wild nature, nobody, a forest setting far from any culture, the opposite of the sunlit Greek world45. He reads the painting as a Romantic escape, far from man and history, unrelated to the Revolution. He links it to an unhappy consciousness which, under the Restoration, takes refuge in fantasies for want of carrying out the revolution6. In 2022, he points to an ecstatic vision of the moon in it, without irony.

1. 1Racine4 Feb 2019 · 10:11
2. 2#5.4 Introduction / Nature ou Paysage ?25 Jan 2019 · 7:37
3. 3#5.4 Introduction / Nature ou Paysage ?25 Jan 2019 · 13:15
4. 4Racine4 Feb 2019 · 55:39
5. 5Chateaubriand26 Mar 2019 · 57:27
6. 6Staël (Mme de )26 May 2019 · 1:36:44

Summary produced automatically from 12 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.