Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age

This companion to the huge 2023 Hamburger Kunsthalle exhibition, celebrating the 250th anniversary of the groundbreaking Romanticist painter’s birth, contains essays by Kunsthalle curators and affiliated art historians. Focusing on Friedrich’s vibrant paintings and illustrations, the book explores his considerable impact on European art history and grounds his work in both historical and contemporary contexts. Along with early and mid-19th-century contemporaries such as Beethoven, Victor Hugo, Mary Shelley, and William Blake, Friedrich forcefully articulated a revolutionary human-centered and emotional approach to European artistic expression. His iconic landscapes created a powerful visual component to the upheaval that swept Europe after the oppressive Napoleonic era and opened a clear path for Impressionist and Expressionist painters to follow.