Benutzerspezifische Werkzeuge

The modern society’s increased distance from nature has led to a preference in art for landscapes that elicit an idealized version of nature, with the classicism-based heroic ideal landscape painting of early 19^th-century Germany forming part of this academic trend. Caspar David Friedrich, a contemporary painter who wanted to confront nature, avoided such idealization. His work with the pen „Cycle of the Four Seasons" (1803) refers to the cycle of season, day, and life, and it is considered the cradle of German Romanticism. Another of his drawings from the same period, „View from the Artist’s Studio" (1805/1806), is associated with this theme, showing that nature is the most essential factor for the painter in everyday life. Through a comparison to the „Long Landscape Scroll" (Landscape of the Four Seasons, 1486) by the Japanese Zen ink painter Sesshū Tōyō, this lecture intends to draw attention to the closeness of human life to nature, which transcends differences in time, culture, and religion.
　

Yuko Nakama is a professor emerita at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. She attended a graduate course at the Art History Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin and received her PhD from Osaka University. Her book „Caspar David Friedrich und die Romantische Tradition: Moderne des Sehens und Denkens" was published by Reimer Verlag in Berlin in 2011. From 2022 to 2023, she was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, where she researched the comparative art history of the West and East. “Sesshū’s Long Landscape Scroll: Life and Death in the Cycle of the Four Seasons” will be published in early 2024 in Volume 9 of the Journal of Asian Arts and Aesthetics.
[Caption: Caspar David Friedrich, Cycle of the Four Seasons (Autumn), 1803; Sesshū Tōyō, Long Landscape Scroll (Autumn), 1486]

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