Apocalypse Now: On Heinrich von Kleist, Caspar David Friedrich, and the Emergence of Abstract Art

Abstract

While discussions of abstract art usually imply that the movement began in the twentieth century, its conceptualization pre‐dates its identification as a distinct tendency in the visual arts. One early text that articulates the premises of abstract art is Heinrich von Kleist's “Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft,” his narrative response from 1810 to Caspar David Friedrich's controversial painting Der Mönch am Meer. For all its inherent radicality and despite its departure from mimetic representation, Der Mönch am Meer does not constitute a leap on the part of Friedrich to abstract aesthetics. Rather, I argue that, in his re‐imagining of Der Mönch am Meer, Kleist crosses this threshold, constituting a vision of nonrepresentational art nearly a century prior to its purported existence. As I show by examining both painting and prose, what Friedrich anticipates with his visual image, Kleist describes in his written text.