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Caspar David Friedrich’s Lonely Islands
A retrospective at the Met captures the German romanticist’s epic melancholy.
His art helped inform the dreamy imagery of Disney’s Fantasia, and Samuel Beckett said Friedrich’s moody Two Men Contemplating the Moon inspired Waiting for Godot. The influence of the 1817 existential masterpiece Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog — which depicts a man in a dark overcoat with cane poised above a cloud-wreathed valley, both master of his domain and utterly alienated from it — can be seen in everything from the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe to the television show Severance to countless memes. The Abbey in the Oakwood is similarly enigmatic, featuring a derelict cemetery with tilting tombstones and the ruins of a church amid leafless trees, as is Greifswald in Moonlight, a nighttime scene of fishing vessels at low tide with a German city in the haze.
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