.During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a striking and memorable oil painting portraying a jagged mountain of ice in the North Sea was executed by the great German Romantic Era artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). The painting called The Wreck of Hope (the early 1820s) was inspired by Admiral William Parry’s search for a route to Asia through the North Pole. The work is one of the finest pre-modern paintings to capture the spirit, energy, and very corpus of Diagonality. In that sense, the painting foreshadowed the angular geometric motif that was to alter the essence of art and culture that emerged at the very start of the twentieth century.
The Wreck of Hope (known earlier as Das Eismeer or The Sea of Ice) is described in Wikipedia as a shipwreck in the “middle of a broken ice-sheet, whose shards have piled up after the impact.” Horizontal slabs of ice looking like they are made of stone appear at the bottom of the painting, but they rise inexorably in crisscrossing jagged shards creating an almost religiously spirited composition. The pile of ice sheets looks like they are reaching for a trace of sunlight emanating from a thin scattering of clouds above the icy pyramidal mass below. An almost invisible trace of the doomed ship’s mast slants up at a low angle through the ice and culminates in a threatening, dart-shaped pinnacle.
The Wreck of Hope was not the only painting in which Friedrich employed a dramatic diagonal motif. Diagonals were a compositional feature that ran through many of his major paintings and also through his extensive oil studies of ice floes on the river Elbe, near Dresden. Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is a painting with diagonal compositional elements and triangular massing that focus on a centrally positioned man, seen from behind, contemplating the harsh consequences of a cold and turbulent seascape.
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Dinesh said:
.During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a striking and memorable oil painting portraying a jagged mountain of ice in the North Sea was executed by the great German Romantic Era artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). The painting called The Wreck of Hope (the early 1820s) was inspired by Admiral William Parry’s search for a route to Asia through the North Pole. The work is one of the finest pre-modern paintings to capture the spirit, energy, and very corpus of Diagonality. In that sense, the painting foreshadowed the angular geometric motif that was to alter the essence of art and culture that emerged at the very start of the twentieth century.
The Wreck of Hope (known earlier as Das Eismeer or The Sea of Ice) is described in Wikipedia as a shipwreck in the “middle of a broken ice-sheet, whose shards have piled up after the impact.” Horizontal slabs of ice looking like they are made of stone appear at the bottom of the painting, but they rise inexorably in crisscrossing jagged shards creating an almost religiously spirited composition. The pile of ice sheets looks like they are reaching for a trace of sunlight emanating from a thin scattering of clouds above the icy pyramidal mass below. An almost invisible trace of the doomed ship’s mast slants up at a low angle through the ice and culminates in a threatening, dart-shaped pinnacle.
The Wreck of Hope was not the only painting in which Friedrich employed a dramatic diagonal motif. Diagonals were a compositional feature that ran through many of his major paintings and also through his extensive oil studies of ice floes on the river Elbe, near Dresden. Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is a painting with diagonal compositional elements and triangular massing that focus on a centrally positioned man, seen from behind, contemplating the harsh consequences of a cold and turbulent seascape.
Dinesh said:
Dinesh said: