Vision Group from the Backwater

By ROBERT HUGHES

EVERY leaf and blade of grass swarms with life, the earth is alive and stirs beneath me, everything rings in one chord, then the soul rejoices and flies in the immeasurable space around me. There is no up and down any more, no beginning and no end, I hear and feel the living breath of God . . ." Dr. Leary? Alan Watts? No; it was thus, in 1802, that a 25-year- old painter named Philipp Otto Runge set down his ecstatic nature worship in a letter to his elder brother. It may be that Runge had what most of us have lostthe power to get high on ordinary grass. He was one of a group of artists who emerged from a backwater of painting, Germany, at the start of the 19th century. They inherited no secure historical position. Their diversity was extreme. Some left Germany for Rome and Raphael; others remained at home, seeking a continuity with the Gothic past; their images ran a gamut from Blakean vision to the tightest realism. From this jumble rose a group whose imagination transcended the constraint of their circumstances; they are represented in a fascinating show, "German Painting in the 19th Century," which opened last week at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Historically, this phase of German art has had a raw deal. To think of 19th century painting is automatically to think French. A grand panorama rises in the mind's eyeDavid to Delacroix, Courbet to Manet and the Impressionists. But though the German Romantic painters did not rival the achievements of the French, Yale's show does remind viewers that "mainstreams" are not the only art worth enjoying.

Dark Imaginations. As the century began, the settled rules of neoclassicist art could no longer contain the experience of a generation of Germans who had grown up with war, conquest and instability. The dark woods and branching Gothic vegetation that Duerer and SchOengauer had engraved came back to haunt living artists; the full force of literary romanticism, with its themes of love, death, exile and transcendence, played over them. The caped solitary figures in Caspar David Friedrich's paintings, staring mutely at the horizon with backs turned, are like footnotes to Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.

One faction in German critical thought exhorted artists to stay home, to relate themselves to the northern, Gothic past, to be German painters. But in 1800, modern art meant neoclassicism, and that meant Rome. One of the first on the trek to Italy was Joseph Anton Koch, who headed south in 1794. There is an almost schizophrenic gap between his early landscapes, conceived in reverent imitation of Poussin, and a later painting like Macbeth and the Witches (1834). It is a full-blown response to Goethe's Sturm und Drang, with its flailing energies of cloud and sea, its Gothic spikiness, and its perverse adoption of Michelangelo's image of God on the Sistine ceiling for the pointing gesture of the first witch.

Those who stayed at home cut further into the dreams of their time. Schnorr von Carolsfeld's entwined lovers jump from a cliff, in erotic slow-motion; romantic fascination with the "inseparability" of love and death was never put more concisely than in this smooth, slick image of sexual harakiri. Johann Hummel transformed a granite bowl, erected in the Berlin pleasure gardens, into an object as disquieting as a flying saucer: with fanatical precision, the tiny reflections of passers-by are caught in its mirror-polished surface, twisted and topsy-turvy, as though Magritte had been let loose in 1832.

But it is the poetic interpreters of nature who are the most interesting figures in the Yale exhibition: Dahl Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge. Friedrich's landscapes, with their pulsating white moons, flat dark seas and clawing oaks, personify the sense of an immanence of God in nature that was the core of his art. "A picture," Friedrich wrote, "must not be devised but perceived. Shut your corporeal eye, so that you see first your picture with your spiritual eye." It was a German parallel to William Blake's observation: "I Question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro' it & not with it."

Encyclopedic Statement. Runge, who died in 1810 at the age of 33, shared this passion for nature's spirit. His large Morning (1808-10) was one of an unfinished cycle of panels on the theme of "The Four Times of Day." Its knotty allegories have never been fully deciphered, and may never have come wholly clear to Runge himself. Evidently he was combining several systems of mythChristian, Judaic, classicalin one encyclopedic statement. But for all its obscurities, its transcendent optimism blazes forth: this is the closest contemporary equivalent to Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

Morning is about freshness, birth, starting new. Aurora, goddess of dawn, advances from a distant pearl-pink horizon, and a newborn baby lies squirming on a carpet of grass and flowers. In a flood of crystalline blue light, lilies open in the sky to release their freight of music-making putti. "When I turn to flowers and trees," Runge once wrote, "it becomes clearer to me how in each plant is contained a certain human spirit, idea or feeling, and it is very clear to me that it must have originated in Paradise." -Robert Hughes

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