Saturday Links

Caspar David Friedrich’s kitsch, the man who organized nature, a National Book Award for non-nationals, and more.

Caspar David Friedrich, Morning in the Giant Mountains (c. 1810). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Good morning! In 1818, Caspar David Friedrich painted what came to be seen as the quintessentially Romantic work of art—The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. He was also one of Hitler’s favorite painters, and while there has been an attempt recently to redeem his work, as I noted a few weeks ago, Peter E. Gordon argues in The New Statesman that it is mostly kitsch:

The first painting that brought him to public notice, the 1808 Cross in the Mountains (also known as the Tetschen Altar), portrays a crucifixion on a high rock flanked by pine trees and backlit by a pink sky. The image, at least to the modern eye, already betrays a kind of immodesty, a piety so extreme that it verges on the impious. But what marks its definitive fall into kitsch are the three shafts of light that pierce the clouded skyline like searchlights. With this illumination nature becomes not just supernatural but unnatural, and the sacred turns sanctimonious. A few years earlier, Friedrich had drawn a similar scene in muted tones of sepia on paper. The drawing is admittedly less garish, but the artist’s penchant for high drama still lapses into artifice: the crucified Jesus appears as if he were on a theatrical stage . . . Consider again the stance of the Wanderer as he confronts the sea of fog, and ask yourself: does this figure convey anything like humility? Vulnerability? Irony? Suffering? The only honest response we can give is that the entirety of the painting’s composition has the effect of fortifying the subject and elevating him above the landscape he surveys. Everything in his posture, even the walking stick that gives him a third support on his rocky perch, suggests an attitude of stoic ataraxia or non-disturbance. He is not threatened by the scene before him; he is not even implicated in it; his bourgeois dress dramatises the stark divide between his civilised subjectivity and the unruly world.”

Gerald O’Collins writes about the friendship of Seamus Heaney and the Jesuit poet Peter Steele: “It was always a joy and a fortification of sorts to have Peter in the house. As you know he made a point of calling in Dublin when he was on his way to Georgetown, and having him in your company was like putting your back to some great tree when the sap was rising.”

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Lorraine Daston reviews a newly translated biography of Carl von Linné, or Linnaeus, who identified more than 4,000 plants:

Gunnar Broberg’s biography of Linnaeus, originally published in Swedish in 2019, is a portrait of the man who, more than any other, has come to epitomise Enlightenment . . . The book documents Linnaeus’s life and work, from his youthful travels in Lapland and Western Europe to his voluminous exchanges with some six hundred correspondents and his dealings with his publisher, his university colleagues and students, and his exasperated wife. The wealth of detail is staggering and sometimes suffocating. Do we really need to be told that a casual acquaintance tried to pick up a girl called Doris at a party, or that one of Linnaeus’s students fathered 32 children by three wives? But we should be grateful to Broberg for the decades of research distilled into this volume, the closest thing to a comprehensive and contextualised account of Linnaeus as we are likely to get for at least a generation.

Linnaeus wasn’t modest. As a young man he drew up lists of the books he intended to publish, and much later in life, anxious to manage his posthumous reputation, he prepared several vitae of himself that he hoped would serve as material for obituaries. Just in case readers should turn out to be insufficiently appreciative, he wrote reviews and endorsements of his own books. He doesn’t seem to have been a particularly gifted student, graduating eleventh out of seventeen at school and not bothering to sign up for anatomy lessons as a medical student at the University of Uppsala. Yet his self-confidence bordered on the brazen. His particular talent, his one passion, was for natural history, especially insects and plants.

A short history of Nuremberg: “‘An ugly city,’ wrote Mozart to a friend in 1790. Less taciturn was Hans Christian Anderson who referred to Nuremberg as the ‘quintessence of medieval culture.’ What’s certain is that the aesthetics of the city take second place to mercantile demands. At the same time the new emperors of the Holy Roman Empire were holding their Diet here (a custom that lasted until 1571), the ordinary burghers of the city were busy forging (quite literally) Nuremberg into one of Europe’s most important trading hubs.”

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Poem: Michele Herman, “Living Situation on Thomes Street”

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The National Book Award opens prizes to non-nationals: “Authors who ‘maintain their primary, long-term home in the U.S., U.S. territories, or Tribal lands’ will be eligible for consideration for the 75th National Book Awards, which will open for submissions on March 13.”

Selfies and art don’t mix: “‘It strikes us as something that’s becoming a growing trend,’ Robert Read, head of Fine Art and Private Clients at the Hiscox insurance company, told Hyperallergic. ‘We’re not going to change the whole way we underwrite, but it’s something that’s becoming concerning for museums and other public spaces, as well.’ While Hiscox does not keep specific statistics on selfie-related damage versus other kinds of claims, Read contends that it is fairly obvious when the incident involves a visitor backing into a piece of art versus being mishandled in shipping or sustaining other forms of damage. In recent years, there have been several high-profile art accidents, including the destruction of a Jeff Koons balloon dog sculpture at a 2023 Miami art fair and a confirmed selfie-related incident in 2017 that broke a Yayoi Kusama pumpkin sculpture in one of the artist’s notoriously selfie-friendly Infinity Mirrors rooms.”

Fiona Sturges praises a new collection of BBC recordings of Dylan Thomas’s work: “Thomas, who influenced Bob Dylan and the Beatles, loved radio and delivered a series of BBC broadcasts in the 1940s and early 50s which took in poems, short stories, critical appreciations and reminiscences of his Welsh childhood. Many of those recordings feature here, including ‘Holiday Memory,’ a nostalgia-soaked portrait of a sunny August bank holiday in Swansea, and ‘Quite Early One Morning,’ about a man’s dawn walk through the streets of a seaside town ‘like a stranger come out of the sea, shrugging off weed and wave and darkness with each step’. In ‘A Visit to America,’ recorded weeks before the author’s death in 1953 at the age of 39, Thomas relives a recent US lecture tour awash with ‘exhibitionists, polemicists, histrionic publicists, theological rhetoricians, historical hoddy-doddies, balletomanes, ulterior decorators, windbags and bigwigs and humbugs’.”

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War hero, bon vivant, spy—the many masks of Frederick Rutland: “Frederick Rutland . . . lived for over half a decade in a Beverly Hills mansion paid for by Japanese Naval Intelligence. He had been under surveillance by the FBI, the US Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and MI5. The failure to take the threat from Japan seriously, along with their rivalry, organizational chaos, fear of national humiliation and even a murky deal with Naval Intelligence, stopped the evidence from being shared that would have led to his arrest. Rutland’s glamorous Beverly Hills parties, with Hollywood A-listers such as Charlie Chaplin and Boris Karloff, together with his membership in Hollywood clubs like the British United Services Club, were the perfect cover for the Great War hero.”

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Forthcoming: W. H. Auden, The Shield of Achilles (Critical Edition), edited by Alan Jacobs (Princeton, May 7): “As Jacobs writes in the introduction, Auden’s collection ‘is the boldest and most intellectually assured work of his career, an achievement that has not been sufficiently acknowledged.’ Describing the book’s formal qualities and careful structure, Jacobs shows why The Shield of Achilles should be seen as one of Auden’s most central poetic statements—a richly imaginative, beautifully envisioned account of what it means to live, as human beings do, simultaneously in nature and in history.”