Symmetry and Its Disruption in Paintings by Caspar David Friedrich

Starting from Caspar David Friedrich's masterful painting 'Woman at the Window' (1822), David E. Wellbery will consider how the artist creates an interplay between symmetry and asymmetry, producing a tense imbalance within certain paintings. This compositional tension occasionally intersects with Friedrich's often remarked tendency to replicate the viewer's standpoint within the depicted world. Examination of this technique leads to an appreciation of the dramatic and metaphysical senses of some of Friedrich's best-known works.
This event accompanies The Chicago Center for Caspar David Friedrich Studies Library, an exhibition of curator Dieter Roelstraete's collection of books, magazines, and records with the Romantic painter's iconic work 'Wanderer Above a Sea of Clouds.'
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
David E. Wellbery
David E. Wellbery is the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor, Germanic Studies, Committee on Social Thought, at the University of Chicago (since 2001). Since 1998 he has been the co-editor of the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte. His publications include: Lessing's Laocoon. Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (1984); The Specular Moment: Goethe's Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (1996); Schopenhauer's Significance for Modern Literature (1998); Seiltänzer des Paradoxalen. Essays on Aesthetic Science (2007); Goethe's Faust. Reflection on the Tragic Form (2016); and Goethe's Pandora. Dramatization of a Prehistory of Modernity (2017).

The exhibition will be open during events and by appointment only on weekdays from 10am-4pm; please email [email protected] to request a viewing time.

Host or Publisher Goethe-Institut Chicago