Depeche Mode and Caspar David Friedrich: Pleasures Remain So Does the Pain, Words are Meaningless and Forgettable

Autumn is a time for wistfulness, melancholy and introspection, and also a time for one of my favourite painters Caspar David Friedrich whose Romantic landscapes perfectly fit this autumnal mood.

Caspar David Friedrich, Memories of the Giant Mountains, 1835

These days I was listening to Depeche Mode and I especially enjoyed the song “Enjoy the Silence” which is probably their most recognisable song anyway. I also enjoyed watching the video, directed by Anton Corbijn, where the singer Dave Gaham is dressed as a king and is seen walking around through fields, meadows, beaches and mountains; all the landscapes which irresistibly bring to mind the moody landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. The specific places in the video are the Scottish Highlands, the Algarve coast in Portugal and the Swiss Alps which beautifully showcases the beauties and diverities of European landscapes. All of these places in nature; forests, beaches, snow-capped mountains, can easily be found not only in paintings of Friedrich but also in paintings of other Romantic painters. Corbijn’s concept behind the video was that the King (Dave Gahan) represented “a man with everything in the world, just looking for a quiet place to sit; a king of no kingdom.” I think the video is a good representation of that.

Whilst gazing at the video, I suddenly remembered something that my friend had said. Years ago he had sent me the video to the song “Enjoy the Silence” and pointed at the similarity between the video’s aesthetic and the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. I hadn’t seen the video before he had sent it to me because I was mostly listening to Depeche Mode from my mother’s casettes, so this was something very interesting to me. These days my thoughts again turned to Depeche Mode and Friedrich and finally I felt it was the right time to tackle the topic because, as you know, I am always fond of discovering aesthetic parallels between art and rock music and poetry. I had done so previously by connecting the cover of Echo and the Bunnymen’s album “Crocodiles” (1980) and “Heaven Up Here” (1981) to Friedrich’s landscapes. I am writing this post with the memories of my friend who, although estranged from me now, will always have a place in my heart. And, interestingly, Corbijn also directed many music videos of Echo and the Bunnymen too.

Scenes from the “Enjoy the Silence” video.

In some scenes of the video, Gahan is seen as a solitary figure against the vast landscape; a transient figure passing through the ever-lasting landscapes of beauty. In some scenes he is sitting and turning his back to us, which is again something we see often in Friedrich’s art, for example in his famous painting “Moonrise Over the Sea” (1822). In the scenes filmed at the beach in Portugal the sea waves are crushing onto the sandy shore and Gahan is seen looking out at the sunset over the sea, everything painted in dusky pink and purple shades, and this romantic imagery is also seen in many of Friedrich’s beach scenes. In one scene Gahan is walking across a landscape where the tree is the only other thing in the scene and there is a tight line separating the land from the vastness of the sky. This, for example, made me think of Friedrich’s painting “Monk by the Sea” (1808-1810). I also incorporated the lyrics of the song into this post because I like them, I think they are wise and profound and they fit the mood of loneliness and isolation that Friedrich’s landscapes have.

Words like violence
Break the silence
Come crashing in
Into my little world
Painful to me
Pierce right through me
Can’t you understand?
Oh, my little girl

Caspar David Friedrich, Evening, 1821

Caspar David Friedrich, Seashore by Moonlight, 1835-36

All I ever wanted
All I ever needed
Is here in my arms
Words are very unnecessary
They can only do harm

Caspar David Friedrich, Riesengebirge, 1830-35

Scenes from the “Enjoy the Silence” video.

Caspar David Friedrich, Sunset (Brothers) or Evening landscape with two men, 1830-35

Vows are spoken
To be broken
Feelings are intense
Words are trivial
Pleasures remain
So does the pain
Words are meaningless
And forgettable

Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1808-10

Scenes from the “Enjoy the Silence” video.

Caspar David Friedrich – On the Sailing Boat

“Let’s love, then! Love, and feel while feel we can
The moment on its run.
There is no shore of Time, no port of Man.
It flows, and we go on…”

(Alphonse de Lamartine, The Lake, translated by A.Z.Foreman)

Caspar David Friedrich, On the Sailing Boat, 1818-20

Friedrich, the melancholy misanthrop and loner of Greifswald, had finally tied the knot on the 21 January 1818, just a few months after his fourty-third birthday. His young bride was the twenty-five year old Caroline Bommer whose elegant figure in a red dress we can see in a few of his paintings from that time period. Friedrich’s friend, and a fellow painter, Carl Gustav Carus noted that the marriage didn’t leave a trace on Friedrich, but there is a subtle yet notable shift in Friedrich’s work after the marriage; the colours are softer, the overall mood lighter, and human figures appear more often. In fact, his famous and perhaps even the most beautiful painting “Moonrise Over the Sea” was painted in 1820. Nothing compares the pink and purple sky in that painting, it’s something most dreamy and romantic. But this uplifting, lighter phase of his career was, sadly, only a short Nordic summer; as he was getting older his gloominess prevailed and he started returning to his moody, isolated landscapes.

Painting “On the Sailing Boat” shows a couple, that is, the painter and his wife, sitting at the prow of the ship, hand in hand, gliding towards the infinity of their love. Typical for Friedrich, the figures are seen either from behind or in profile, which definitely adds to the mysterious appeal. The tender purple and blue waves are cradling the lovers’ boat and above them the yellow-tinted vanilla sky is smiling with promises of future joys. In the distance the shadowy contours of a townscape appear as if they are seen through the mist, or – seen in a dream. The vastness of the sky and the sea further intensifies the dreamy, almost mystical aura of this painting which correlates to the Romantics’ view on love, or a cult of love we might even say, as a union of souls. This solemn seriousness towards the matters of love was a far cry from the frivolous and playful attitude of the Rococo generation. Just how different is this dreamy painting to something painted by Boucher or Fragonard. The subtle melancholy which permeats Friedrich’s paintings, even the seemingly joyful ones, brings to mind the work of Watteau. It seems the two painters have more in common than one would initially assume. Their work, although so dreamy and charming, holds a deeper truth about life: that all human experiences are bitter-sweet and transient: “Upon the sea of time can we not ever/ Drop anchor for one day?” (de Lamartine, The Lake) Another interesting thing about this painting is the viewpoint; while gazing at the painting we feel as if we too are on the boat and that makes us closer to the scene in the painting, but two is a company, three’s a crowd, we better leave them alone to enjoy the hours of bliss until they pass…

Carl Spitzweg and Marc Chagall: Romantic Fiddlers

These days I was truly relishing in my ever-growing love of violin music, mostly through the sound of the British chamber pop band Tindersticks and their melancholy and wistful nineties songs woven with passion and yearning, but also through the compositions by the classical composers as well. A fiddler (or a violinist) is a very recognisable motif in the art of Marc Chagall and it often appears in his art over the years and decades. With my love of violins and Chagall’s art, I was delighted to see the motif of a violinist in a painting by a German painter Carl Spitzweg. These two paintings are very different, and I thought it would be fun to compare the different executions of the same motif.

Carl Spitzweg, The Serenade, 1854

Carl Spitzweg is a very underrated painter in my opinion because he painted a plethora of delightful genre scenes which deserve to be further explored. His art is not a flashy, sensational, provocative kind, but rather the kind which grows more beautiful the longer you gaze at it. “The Serenade”, painted in 1854, is one such genre painting. It shows a man climbing the ladder, I will assume, to the window of the woman he loves to play her a serenade, to seduce her and make her sigh with delight. He is seen from the profile, we can barely see his face, he is an anonymous, mysteries character; a romantic and a dreamer, caught in his act of romance by the painter’s artistic eye, but at the same time he is a plain, average man; he isn’t a knight in shining armour or a strong, young hero of a maiden’s dream. The somewhat monotonous colour palette may appear boring at first, but it is somehow very fitting. Brick wall and old roof tiles don’t particularly create a romantic stage for this serenade, but I think his humble simplicity only adds to the romance of the scene in some strange way because life isn’t always a perfect fairy tale, but it can have its magical moments. This fiddler may be an average Joe, but to a woman he is serenading he’s a maverick. Spitzweg always paints everyday people and manages to bring out their eccentric and quirky sides.

Chagall’s “Blue Fiddler” painted in 1947, almost a century after Spitzweg’s fiddler, is more red than blue; his face is red as poppies and roses and crimson hued as the love that the sound of his music must be creating. His wild hair and large eyes look poetic make him look mystical and dreamy, as if he were a nocturnal creature from some other world, fiddling away every night under the light of the moon. Chagall’s fiddler isn’t a man from a poor, shabby suburb but rather lives entirely in a surreal, magical, dreamy world of his own. Enveloped with the blue cloak of the night, above the sleeping blue houses, in the company of birds and a bouquet of flowers, this fiddler is a mystical, ethereal creature; he isn’t serenading his beloved, his is serenading the world with his violin lullabies. Chagall’s fiddler is universal and dreamy, and Spitzweg’s fiddler is a local eccentric, but both can make us ponder on the magic, seductive nature of music and the effect it can have on the listeners. Music, and art too, are a loving embrace that shield us from the world.

Marc Chagall, The Blue Fiddler, 1947

Ernst Ferdinand Oehme – Hohnstein Castle in Saxon Switzerland

"I wandered under the branches 

Alone with my despair; 
Touched with a host of memories 

I fell to dreaming there."
(Heinrich Heine) 

Ernst Ferdinand Oehme, Hohnstein Castle in Saxon Switzerland, 1827

This painting by a German Romantic painter Ernst Ferdinand Oehme looks so dreamlike and unreal that one would assume it is a mirage or a scene from one’s reverie, but no, it indeed shows a real castle splendidly situated on the top of the hill, vast woodland bellow it and only sky stretching on and on above it. The castle seems dream-like, and yet its forms are vividly clear and tangible. Towers and roofs stand out clear and sharp against the dreamy yellow dusk sky tinged with lavender and soft blue. The Hohnstein castle is stretched playfully over the huge rocks and the scene looks like something out of a fairy tale. One can easily fall into wild and romantical reveries about knights, damsels and troubadours. The fairy tale beauty of the castle contrasts with the rugged, raw beauty of the large rocks; man’s made architecture meets the untamed beauty of nature. In March 1825 The Crown Prince Friedrich August of Saxony informed the painter that he had bought a little property near Dresden and that he wished to fill his gallery with patriotic landscapes that encapsulate the beauty of German nature and castles. The painting was exhibited in 1827 and was criticised for its “picturesque” quality. Certainly compared to Caspar David Friedrich’s sublime landscapes that capture a whole scope of feelings, from loneliness to transience, this simple painting by Oehme isn’t so special, but I love it. Something about it makes me daydream and I think that a painting that can make you daydream is a good painting.

Caspar David Friedrich – Greifswald Harbour: Set sail in those turquoise days…

It’s that time of the year again, when sweet Autumn rains and whimsical winds bring thoughts of Romanticism and Echo and the Bunnymen to my mind. Gloomy, post-punk and a bit psychedelic melodies of Echo and the Bunnymen’s album Heaven Up Here (1981) resonate perfectly with moods of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings.

Caspar David Friedrich, Greifswald Harbour, 1818-20

Dreamy and gloomy paintings of Caspar David Friedrich go hand in hand with brooding post-punk melodies of Echo and the Bunnymen’s album Heaven Up Here; this artistic match made in heaven delights me beyond belief, often to the point of tears – tears of beauty. Similar mood pervades Friedrich’s painting Greifswald Harbour and song Turquoise Days; moody melody coming from the distance, from a rocky beach somewhere in Wales, emerging from an ancient Albion mist, coming from the distant Celtic shore… Similar dreamy, yet sombre mood can be found in all of Friedrich’s artworks, specially those portraying a beach or a harbour, where ships appear from the blueish mist, like in a dream.

In ‘Greifswald Harbour’ Friedrich revisits the landscape of his childhood, portraying the harbour of Greifswald; a seaport on the Baltic coast and his birth town. Cold climate and death of close relatives intensified his tendency towards melancholy, his sensitivity and perhaps even a certain sense of isolation that dominates his paintings. Take a look at the painting. I’ll give you a moment to sober up from the beauty of those dusky colours and mystic shades of blue, green, grey and yellow.

Greifswald Harbour was painted between 1818 and 1820, in times when Romantic sensibilities were slowly becoming ‘passé‘, and Friedrich was perceived not as a symbol of a generation and a romantic hero, but as an overly melancholic recluse who spend most of his time alone, wandering woods and meadows, and enjoying the isolation. He said himself: “I am not so weak as to submit to the demands of the age when they go against my convictions. I spin a cocoon around myself; let others do the same. I shall leave it to time to show what will come of it: a brilliant butterfly or maggot.” It goes without saying that the fruit of his life, his oeuvre, is indeed ‘a brilliant butterfly’.

Aesthetically, this is a typical painting of Romanticism. Symbolically, it deals with subjects of transience and painters own mortality. In the dusk, small and large ships appear through a misty veil of Autumn evening. Glimpses of cityscape appear through the grey blueish fog. Shy waning moon shines in the sky. Day is dying in rich warm yellow and orange shades, while fishermen in the foreground are nearing the end of the working day, probably in a hurry to visit an inn or a brothel. Ah, the mood of harbours, with sailors and hookers, goods from the far East, constant change and movement… Friedrich’s harbour is a somewhat desolate place. Those large ships are probably returning from a long trip, or just setting off to a new voyage, but what about the smaller ones? Some ships probably never left the harbour, nothing exciting comes on their path. They could spent a whole existence soaking in the cold sea water waiting for something which never really occurs. It’s like an unlived life. Once again, Friedrich stimulates the viewer to observe the deeper, psychological side of his art.

In Friedrich’s art, human figures are either missing or painted from the back. You may be wondering then, why he decided to include a bunch of fishermen in the foreground? Well, the figures of fishermen and the boat in the foreground weren’t painted by Friedrich himself, but were added later. Infrared photographs of the painting taken in 1974 revealed this two centuries old secret. Why did someone decide to do that, we’ll never know. Perhaps one considered the painting too dull with just ships and sky, and wanted to enliven it with human figures. Indeed, someone who doesn’t appreciate the soft transitional moods of Friedrich’s art would deem this painting non exciting because its beauty and charm are hidden behind layers of gauze veils, just like the face of a Victorian bride. As Ludwig Justi wrote: “We cannot appreciate the secret music of this picture without sensing the inner life of the ship. … The forms, appearing quite sober on first sight, are in fact alive with ardour and longing and dreaming.”

I would like to finish this post with beautiful lyrics written by Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen.

“Just when the thought occurs
The panic will pass
And the smell of the fields
Never lasts
We’ll put your faith
In those crimson nights
Set sail
In those turquoise days…” (Echo and the Bunnymen, Turquoise Days)

Dear reader, set sail in the beautiful turquoise days and crimson nights of Autumn that are upon us.

Caspar David Friedrich – A Vision of Eternity

”So driven onward to new shores forever,
Into the night eternal swept away,
Upon the sea of time can we not ever
Drop anchor for one day?

O Lake! Scarce has a single year coursed past.
To waves that she was meant to see again,
I come alone to sit upon this stone
You saw her sit on then. (…)

Pause in your trek O Time! Pause in your flight,
Favorable hours, and stay!
Let us enjoy the transient delight
That fills our fairest day.

Let’s love, then! Love, and feel while feel we can
The moment on its run.
There is no shore of Time, no port of Man.
It flows, and we go on…

(The Lake – Alphonse de Lamartine, translated by A.Z.Foreman)

Moonrise over the Sea, Caspar David Friedrich, 1822

Caspar David Friedrich, although a famous German painter of Romanticism today, was pretty much neglected as an artist until the painters of Symbolism discovered the connection between his paintings and their own ideas. Friedrich’s paintings reflect the mood of Romantic poetry of his times, which is also the mood of Schubert’s music, and some unjustly criticised his art as being to literary. His painting above Moonrise over the Sea, perhaps his most famous work, is a typical Friedrich’s landscape: dreamy but emotionally charged, it shows the sea without the line of horizon which leaves the impression of something infinite.

As usual, we don’t see the faces of his characters, two women and a man in this case, contemplating on a desolate beach, admiring the moonrise perhaps. The colours are exquisite, as I’ve seen the painting in Berlin – now I can die happily. While the stones and the shore in the foreground may seem repulsive in their dark brownness, the sea and the sky are absolutely stunning; lavender shades softly reveal the golden setting sun, then the boats sailing on that magical blueness of the sea… Perhaps the solid brown rocks symbolise stability of his family life, the merging sea and skyline freedom, and the setting sun lost hopes and a feeling of helplessness against transience.

A hint of mystery and infinite is present in this painting as well, some interpret his paintings as portrait of human alienation and solitude. Namely, Caspar was born and grew up in Greifswald, a university town and a seaport on Baltic coast. He remained closely connected to the town even as an adult, and most likely admired the sea himself, for he did say ‘I have to stay alone in order to fully contemplate and feel nature.‘ However, he had experienced a several traumas in his childhood which may had left him with a bleak and melancholic view on life; deaths of people close to him: his mother and sister had died when he was very young, and at thirteen he witnessed his brother drowning while ice-skating.

As I’ve already said, Friedrich’s paintings have often been perceived as highly poetic and connecting them to poetry then seems quite right, don’t you think? Well, as a fan of poetry of Romanticism, I’ve noticed how longer gazing at this painting reminds me of Alphonse de Lamartine’s poem The Lake. The story behind that poem is very sad, but also a material for a novel. In 1816 Lamartine met a young girl by the lake Bourget. The following year he returned to the lake, expecting to see her again, but she wasn’t there. At first he thought that she had stood him up, only to find out later that she had taken ill and died… Still, to him she remained a symbol of platonic, unearthly love.

Echo and the Bunnymen ‘Heaven up Here’, 1981

Art always reinterprets itself and I see a connection between Caspar David Friedrich’s wistful and dreamy, yet lonely landscapes with the cover of the album Heaven up Here by the Echo and the Bunnymen, a great post-punk band from Liverpool. I’ll quote Wikipedia: ‘The photograph used on the front and back cover of the album was taken by photographer Brian Griffin. The picture shows the band on a wet beach in the south of Wales; there are dark clouds in the sky and the sun is low on the horizon causing the band to be silhouetted. The original album’s cover art was designed by Martyn Atkins. Reynolds said that the band’s manager Drummond saw them as representing “cold, dampness, darkness“.‘ I fully recommend the album by the way, as it is perfect for Autumn, the melodies remind me of exactly of Friedrich’s damp and solitary landscapes, but rich in colours, and atmospheric just like songs on Heaven up Here (1981). Song Over the Wall is the one I’ve listened to the most, so I recommend you to check it out if you like.