We always overhype our vacations. After a long morning’s climb the weather is clearing up, and we are peering into the distance, into the fog gathered beneath this craggy outcropping — high above Germany, or what is not yet Germany, where only little tufts of grass push from the bare rock. It was not an easy hike, but we had a purpose. This is what we keep telling ourselves, as we dust our Hessian boots or charge our D.S.L.R. cameras: Hike to the summit, behold the awesome view, and the sight of beauty will change our life.
Yet now, looking out through the thin mountain air … well, of course it’s spectacular. Still, when we look out at the mountains — at the picture of the mountains; we have trouble distinguishing, sometimes — the sensation that washes over us is not exultation but melancholy. This famous view we waited our whole life to see is missing details, seems washed of its particulars. Between us and eternity, between human understanding and the essence of the universe, lies a stubborn, obscuring bed of white cloud.
“Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” the wistful rear view that Caspar David Friedrich painted circa 1817, has the pesky distinction of epitomizing not just a single artist but also a whole epoch: the era of German Romanticism, when Enlightenment ideals of reason and skepticism unleashed a counterrevolution of passion and sentiment.
The solitary Wanderer, in his head-to-toe crushed green velvet, has become a metaphor for Germany itself, and the object of countless paste-ups and parodies. (Angela Merkel, recognizable from the back in her trademark pantsuit, was grafted into this landscape more than once.) Yet the Wanderer has never hiked as far as America, not until now, when from this weekend he will have his back turned to the visitors of “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature.” Already, on a huge poster adorning of the Metropolitan Museum of Art facade, our crestfallen hero has cast his gaze away from Fifth Avenue.
“The Soul of Nature” is much more than a showcase of one Romantic icon, and it has some surprises for audiences who associate Friedrich, and early-19th-century art more generally, with calm and tranquillity. Organized with three German museums, the exhibit includes 88 paintings and drawings, of rocks gleaming in the moonlight, solitary crucifixes in evergreen forests, and lonely Germans gazing out onto the sea.