Uploaded June 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
The Cut in the Image: The Discordant Subject of Caspar David Friedrich
David Collings (Bowdoin College)
The work of major German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1744-1840) reveals a a powerful engagement with both the human and inhuman. Juxtaposing foreground and background without any mediation between them, Friedrich’s boldest paintings make visible a gap or discord between subject and world. As much as his art suggests what lies beyond, such as the idea of infinity, this cut in the image figures the wound of living in a nonhuman world utterly indifferent to human survival. Collings thus argues that Friedrich explores with unusual rigor the advent of a modernity in which we all currently reside.
The Cut in the Image: The Discordant Subject of Caspar David Friedrich
David Collings (Bowdoin College)
The work of major German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1744-1840) reveals a a powerful engagement with both the human and inhuman. Juxtaposing foreground and background without any mediation between them, Friedrich’s boldest paintings make visible a gap or discord between subject and world. As much as his art suggests what lies beyond, such as the idea of infinity, this cut in the image figures the wound of living in a nonhuman world utterly indifferent to human survival. Collings thus argues that Friedrich explores with unusual rigor the advent of a modernity in which we all currently reside.
