Customer Reviews

Caspar David Friedrich

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This should be considered indispensable to anyone interested in this artist, Romanticism, or landscape painting in general. As well as offering a carefully considered account of the artist's life and work, the text is careful to separate the myths that have grown around some of these paintings, carefully placing the artist within the context of his own time and covering the manner in which these images have been misappropriated up to the present day.

Above all, this is the most thorough and best-reproduced representation of this artist's work I have seen to date, containing not only every single painting I have seen from other studies of the artist, but also several I encountered here for the first time. I doubt this will be equalled (let alone surpassed) for many years to come.

Werner Hofmann's new monograph on Caspar David Friedrich benefits from superb colour reproductions as well as Hofmann's own discursive brilliance.

Selections from Friedrich's letters are a neat fit, bowing to the idea that his transcendental painting ultimately eludes scholarly discourse.

This book lands with authority, passion, and a keen sense of the vistas of silence that Friedrich communicates to admirers everywhere.

A bargain. Snap it up if you come across it...

What a great book this is. The images are large, and several include additional plates for details. The images are sharp with great detail. This is very important since many of Friedrich's paintings were very finely detailed. He often incorporated drawing elements into his paintings with very fine lines and hatching. The images reproduced in this book do justice to those fine details. The colors are also rich, while not being garish. Many of these paintings are quite dramatic and the publisher appears to have been meticulous in preserving the artistry and drama of the originals in these reproduced images.

This is a large book with extensive text and many plates. Great resource book. I highly recommend this to every art lover who is building a library of important artists.

This book is the best available monograph in English on the most important exponent of Romanticism in German painting. It is replete with wonderful reproductions of paintings, but also of works on paper (you even get to distinguish the creases in the paper of some drawings)and the text adds a lot to the understanding of Friedrich's art, especially insofar as it succeeds in placing it within its historical and sociological context (its "Zeitgeist" to use the German term, which is the topic of the first chapter). One chapter is devoted to the in-depth study of three paintings deemed Friedrich's masterpieces, all three being icons of German Romanticism, painted between 1807 and 1809 (the Tetschen Altar, the Monk by the Sea and the Abbey in the Oak Wood).

This is an informative book with high-quality reproductions, and those two reasons happen to be the main ones that make me buy an artbook.

Caspar David Friedrich was a visionary genius whose paintings came from a deep inner space. At the same time he was a master technician, I dont know anyone who has captured the magic of moonlight the way he does. Combining immaculate observations of nature with deepfelt inspirations from the divine.

This book encapsules very fine reproductions of his works. And in that respect the book is a feast for the eyes and the soul.

Unfortunately the text is far from on par with its subject. The usual problem when a writer steeped in modern day 'rationalism' and materialism tries to write about a spiritually inspired artist. What we get is informative on a mundane level, while the post-modern mumblings are painfulley inadequate to capture the grandeur of Friedrich's transcendental art.

None the less this book is essential for all lovers of Friedrich and of spiritual art in generel.

Reading through this well laid out book I was constantly amazed by how many incredible works that Caspar David Friedrich painted. Each picture just made me astonished at the beautiful landscapes. Thoroughly recommend this book for anyone interested in art.