In 2025, the Metropolitan Museum will host the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to Caspar David Friedrich in the U.S.

In 2025, the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States devoted to one of the most important exponents of German Romanticism, Caspar David Friedrich (Greifswald, 1774 - Dresden, 1840), will be held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from Feb. 8 to May 11. This was announced by the New York museum venue: Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, that’s the title of the exhibition, will be co-curated by Alison Hokanson (associate curator, Met’s Department of European Paintings) and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein (assistant curator, Met’s Department of Drawings and Prints) and will be made possible in part by the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, Barbara A. Wolfe and Trevor and Alexis Traina. It is also organized in collaboration with the Alte Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, and theHamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg: the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition will feature major loans from all three institutions and more than thirty other public and private lenders from Europe and North America. There have previously been only two exhibitions in the United States devoted to Friedrich: The Romantic Vision of Caspar David Friedrich: Paintings and Drawings from the USSR, at the Metropolitan Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1990-91 and Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers at the Met in 2001, but both featured few works by the artist.

Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, on the other hand, will present some seventy-five oil paintings, drawings, and sketches from each phase of the artist’s career, along with selected works by his contemporaries. Among the loans, exhibited for the first time in the United States, are The Wayfarer on the Sea of Fog (Hamburger Kunsthalle) and The Monk by the Sea (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie), two of the most iconic paintings in Friedrich’s output and in all Romantic art. Many other significant works, such as Dolmen in Autumn (Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), have not been seen in the United States for decades. The exhibition will also bring together for the first time all five of Friedrich’s paintings held in museums in the United States (The Met, Kimbell Art Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, National Gallery of Art, and Saint Louis Art Museum). A rich selection of works on paper from U.S. and international collections will bring attention to Friedrich’s talent as a draughtsman and the centrality of drawing in his creative practice, an aspect of his production unfamiliar to most audiences. As a collaboration between painting and drawing specialists, the exhibition will also consider the ways in which the artist’s painterly interests persisted across media and how different materials and techniques stimulated his formal and thematic innovations.

The exhibition will unfold following a chronological and thematic order, tracing the evolution of Friedrich’s imagery over his four decades of production. Each section will highlight aspects related to the landscape of northeastern Europe and examine the unconventional painting techniques that make Friedrich’s subjects deep in meaning. The variety of works will invite visitors to consider the range of themes explored by Friedrich: religious faith, solitude and companionship, the passage of time and human mortality, the perception of the ineffable and transcendent, concepts of nationality, the familiar versus the unknown, and, more generally, ways of seeing and relating to nature. Overall, the exhibition will present Friedrich’s unique vision of nature with the intention of situating his art within the politics and culture of 19th-century German society.

Caspar David Friedrich reinvented European landscape painting by depicting nature as a setting for spiritual and emotional encounters. Friedrich developed pictorial subjects that emphasize individuality, intimacy, openness, and the complexity of our responses to the natural world. The vision of landscape that unfolds in his art - meditative, mysterious and full of wonder - is still vital today.

“The most significant painter of German Romanticism, Caspar David Friedrich, brilliantly illuminates our understanding of the natural world as a spiritual and emotional landscape,” said Max Hollein, the Metropolitan’s French director and managing director. “This very first major retrospective of Germany’s most beloved painter in the United States follows this year’s celebrations of his work on the occasion of the artist’s 250th birthday. We are thrilled to collaborate with our German museum colleagues and many other generous funders on this rare opportunity to reflect on Friedrich’s depictions of nature and the human condition.”

Over the course of the exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will organize a series of educational and public programs related to the exhibitions, to be announced soon.

A fully illustrated catalog, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press, will accompany the exhibition.

Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon (c. 1825-1830; oil on canvas, 34.9 x 43.8 cm; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wrightsman Collection)

In 2025, the Metropolitan Museum will host the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to Caspar David Friedrich in the U.S.

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