Wanderer above the Sea of Fog shows a man with his back to us on a rock, looking out over a valley of mist. Caspar David Friedrich painted it around 1818, and it is usually read as a picture of a person at the edge of what can be known. The fog is the part of the world that stays closed.
The posters turn him into a conqueror on a summit. The canvas gives him a rock, a walking stick and a view that is mostly cloud.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
That reading makes the fog sound like a defeat. Friedrich did not see it that way.
He is quoted as writing that when a region cloaks itself in mist, it appears larger and more sublime. For a landscape painter, that is not a complaint. Fog was a tool he chose on purpose, and in this picture he spread it over almost the whole valley.
So the usual question, what the man cannot see, is only half of the picture. The other half is what the fog gives him, and why Friedrich thought a world looks bigger when part of it is hidden.
Why did Friedrich want the fog?
Because he distrusted a full canvas. Friedrich mocked rival painters for their overfilled "curiosity shops," with some new feature packed into every corner. His own landscapes left room, and the Wanderer leaves the most: below the man there is almost nothing to look at.
I read his remark about mist as a point about size. A valley you can see is a valley you can measure, and one you cannot see goes on as far as you imagine it.
The commentary in the German History in Documents and Images collection adds a point about his time. It says Friedrich treated incompleteness as a creative force, while the Nazarenes, a rival school of German painters, saw it as a loss to overcome.
Even the mountains around the fog were put together in the studio, from sketches of separate hills. The fog hides the seams between them, and it takes more from the picture than that.
What You'll Discover
What the fog takes away.
Why he turned the man around.
How it became a poster.