Have you noticed how people don’t always do what they say, and that there is a difference, sometimes vast, between our values and our actions? Of course you have. But have you also noticed that art functions in the same way, and that there is a difference between what a work represents and how – that is, by what means – this content is conveyed?
Self-evident, maybe, but it is actually a common delusion that art somehow magically exists separately from the sphere of human relations, for example by hanging in a museum instead of… well, where? Out in public? In reality, art follows the same pattern as human relations because it is a product of the same social conditions. Thus, some art submits to the dominant order by addressing the public from a position of superiority, and some art subverts that same hierarchy by treating the viewer as an equal.
The latter is often said to have proliferated with the Enlightenment idea of equality. The aesthetic equivalent to this intellectual revolution was an art that embraced the idea of equality as part of its form: a modern art. Or, rather, art in the modern sense – in our sense.
Indeed, this is the prelude to the National Museum of Sweden’s [Nationalmuseum] major exhibition The Romantic Eye. After having been postponed for financial reasons, the long-awaited show highlights Romantic art in connection to the 18th century’s “liberation of the individual,” as curator Carl-Johan Olsson puts it in his catalogue essay. Of course, he describes Romanticism’s penchant for passion and intuition as a reaction to Enlightenment faith in reason, as well as influenced by the rebellious Sturm und Drang movement. Yet, at a more fundamental level, Romanticism is said to have presupposed the birth of the modern individual, who, to this day, underpins our “free and critical perception.”
In other words, anyone expecting a proto-Trumpian emotional rollercoaster will be disappointed. The National Museum is a far cry from the political hysteria of our time and has produced an unusually fine-tuned and thoughtful – I dare say, philosophical – exhibition based on a careful selection of contemporary and historical works. Romanticism’s most important invention, we learn, was to place art in the ordinary world rather than in a mythological or religious realm. This meant that Romantic painting increasingly came to resemble the viewer’s own reality in a way that preceded the Realism of the second half of the 19th century. At the same time, the Romantics brought open spaces into their paintings – skies, mists, shadows – in a way that anticipated the abstract art of the 20th century. From this starting point, The Romantic Eye goes to the heart of a certain emotional and visual thinking, and traces it into our times.
The prime example is Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea (1808–1810) in which the German artist depicted a lonely man on a beach with his back to the viewer. “The painting hit like a bombshell,” Olson writes, “it was perceived as artless, without any connection to a specific place or story, while at the same time representing art taken from real life.” In a letter, Friedrich admitted to depicting a monk to communicate how religion was powerless in the face of the great unknown and that people must free themselves from dogma in order to reach a new spirituality.
The Monk by the Sea is not included in The Romantic Eye, but halfway into the dimly lit gallery Friedrich’s later masterpiece Two Men Contemplating the Moon (ca. 1830) glows on an unassuming wall. Like The Monk by the Sea, the painting leaves plenty of room for the viewer’s own associations, but instead of depicting a solitary individual, it shows two companions who have stopped in a clearing during a night-time walk. Their individual characteristics seem to dissolve in the night as they lean against each other in shared wonder at something whose meaning they can only intuit.
What makes Friedrich’s painting so captivating is that it does what it shows. For, surely, the two men metonymically represent the relationship between artist and viewer, critic and artwork, as an equal relationship in which both parties are just as open to what is happening before their eyes. One does not know more or less than the other, and both stand equally amazed, equally ignorant, before the sky above them. Where The Monk by the Sea addresses me as an individual, Two Men Contemplating the Moon addresses me as an equal party in an alliance.
Indeed, the gallery is permeated by the same reassuring atmosphere and sense of being involved in a quiet conversation between friends. Just a few steps away hang two works by Friedrich’s close friend, the Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl: The Morning After the Storm (1819) and Birch Tree in a Storm (1849). Indeed, Dahl was supposedly the first owner of Two Men Contemplating the Moon, and like Friedrich he occupied a central role in Dresden Romanticism. In The Morning After the Storm (1819) waves crash against the rock where a shipwrecked man huddles as his ship – and with it, we may assume, his companions – sinks on the horizon.
In contemporary paintings by Swedish artists Mamma Andersson (Swan Song, 2016) and Ola Billgren (The Tea Drinker, 1970) hanging nearby, the figures seem paralysed by the same anguish or despair that Dahl symbolised two hundred years ago. Or did he? As art historian Bernhard Maaz writes in the catalogue, Dahl painted a new day dawning and a sailor who survived the night. Perhaps there’s even a glimmer of hope in the air? Is Dahl’s work about faith rather than resignation? These questions have no definitive answers because, just as with Friedrich, artist and viewer are united in a particular form of ignorance which is precisely what connects them over time. Similarly, the appeal of Billgren’s painting is hardly its clichéd sentimentality, but rather the fact that it is an open-ended answer to a question that is as tantalising today as it was in the 1970s.
Romanticism’s introverted side is best captured by works such as Johan August Kraft’s Portrait of the Judge Jacob Wilder (1819) – a fine tuned portrait of the magistrate reading a book – or Gustav Adolph Henning’s stripped-down Reading Girl (1828). Here we see hints of the modern individual being born while perusing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or one of the Jena Romantics. The fact that this new individual would have presupposed a more fundamental idea – namely, the idea of equality between individuals, between writer and reader, artist, and viewer – remains an unspoken premise of the show in which the social and political world takes a back seat to our encounter with the art in the present.
Indeed, the individual as an object disappears from view, instead becoming the tacit subject of a new way to approach nature, visually, through clearings, glimpses, and views. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller’s View of the Dachstein from the “Sophien-Doppelblick” near Ischl (1835) – one of many examples of Romantic painters excelling at copying nature – leads us into a row of smaller rooms alongside the large gallery.
The first of these rooms portrays lookout points where people in the 19th century could go to satisfy their “see-fever.” The show then turns its gaze downwards with works depicting ground and vegetation before moving on to rocks and, in an inspiring final manoeuvre, pointing upwards towards the sky and clouds. Each section is precisely installed with a small number of works that could have been extended into fascinating exposition in their own right. A series of small cloud studies by Norwegian artist Knud Baade – incidentally, a student of John Christian Dahl in Dresden – perfectly captures the tension between fantasy and sobriety, or rapture and reason, that characterises the Nordic-German axis that sets the tone for the show. There are no John Constables as far as the eye can see, just one small painting by J.M.W. Turner, and a couple by Eugène Delacroix. Nostalgic Nazarenes and French troubadour-style painters are only included as notes in the margins. Painters of the freakish and phantasmagorical, like William Blake and Phillipp Otto Runge, were not invited to the ball.
Not that the result would have been improved by a wall of Turners. On the contrary, the fact that the exhibition doesn’t emphasise certain artists at the expense of others is precisely what makes it a compelling presentation of a certain gaze rather than a traditional historical survey or a celebration of exceptional individuals. Friedrich is important, but German Romanticism is represented just as well by Carl Gustav Carus or Victor Emil Janssen, while Turner is framed as one of many artists depicting stormy seas. Considering the National Museum long-standing financial difficulties, The Romantic Eye carries itself with admirable artistic integrity.
If the first gallery was a gentle prelude luring the viewer in with soft notes, then the second arrives with a furious crescendo of volcanic eruptions, stormy seas, and raging rivers. One of the few nineteenth-century painters from Sweden in the exhibition, Marcus Larson, is, on the other hand, represented with one of the largest paintings: the magnificent, 2.5-metre-wide Waterfall in Småland (1856). Larson is counted among the Düsseldorf School, which has a more dubious reputation than the Dresden Romantics and isn’t featured as prominently. Two contemporary paintings are just as eye-catching as Larson’s: Leif Engström’s close-up of a spruce forest in what appears to be natural size, Evening with a Strong Light (2020), and Ann Frössén’s expressive The Rising Tide (2024). The turn from contemplation to eruption is exciting, yet the theme of nature and the sublime seems less original than the starting out of the exhibition.
The row of adjoining smaller rooms – depicting ruins, nightmares, and various forms of misery – don’t feel quite as convincing either. Instead of the pensive look at a reality shared by artist and viewer, we are confronted with a less… sympathetic gaze. Indeed, slightly different selection and emphasis could probably have resulted in a completely different image of Romanticism: as the cradle of a predatory, exoticising, and gluttonous gaze; a gaze that, of course, could just as easily have been traced into the present.
Clearly, National Museum has sought to present Romanticism in a way that is easy for contemporary viewers to appreciate. And easy it is. Delightfully easy, in fact. In the middle room, Norwegian artist Peder Balke’s somber Stockholm in Moonlight (1840) is displayed across from an abstract starry sky by the contemporary painter Paul Fägerskiöld (Stockholm, January 1,100,000, South, 2020), accompanied by the sounds of a cover version of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (1801) by pop musician Henning Fürst. Populism? No. Today that means identifying a group and exploiting it, which is the opposite of what is going on here. Who appreciates the beauty of a starry sky or the moonlight? Well, who doesn’t?
Despite taking the birth of the individual as its point of departure, The Romantic Eye contains a large number of works that seem to be about obliterating the individual. In an introductory part about the Romantic genius, two of Sweden’s most celebrated millennial painters, Sixten Sandra Österberg and Engström, are displayed alongside nineteenth-century painters Carus and Janssen. To me, Engström’s large-scale detailed studies of spruce forests do not seem to be about individuality at all, but about using painting to reach beyond individuality. And with reservation for lack of art-historical expertise, I don’t believe that Carus wanted to depict his personal view of An Old German Town in the First Light of Dawn (1840). Rather, the artist’s meticulous drawing and unusual bird’s-eye view suggest that he wanted to bracket his own position and capture a collective gaze. More precisely, the gaze of a certain old town. If anything, the painting appears to capture the town’s gaze on itself.
Not even Friedrich von Ammerling’s four artist portraits hanging nearby signal, in my view, individuality so much as interchangeability in the sense that they exemplify a gaze that can be directed at anyone. Has Österberg slipped a keffiyeh into her self-portrait to signal a personal political stance? More likely, the Swedish painter wants to invoke the fundamental principle of the equal value of all human beings, which is currently dying as Europe and the US continue sanctioning Israel’s grotesque war in Gaza.
Is it not in fact the case that Romanticism did not invent the genius at all, as it is often claimed, but rather democratised it by making it accessible to more people? Is this not exactly what the National Museum demonstrates by encouraging us to look at, say, Friedrich’s works just like the artist himself supposedly did? Thus, much like Two Men Contemplating the Moon, this exhibition seems to do what it shows by making a certain way of seeing something the viewer can step into. The genius, the very essence of this seeing, no longer appears as an exceptional position linked to certain toxic privileges, but as a democratic function of the Romantic gaze.
As Kristian Vistrup Madsen recently wrote in Kunstkritikk, there is a counter-reaction to identity politics and academic kitsch among artists working with “moods” to dissolve the boundary between subject and object. At the National Museum, such moody or atmospheric Romanticism is brought to a head with Baade’s The Guardian of the Sea (1840), a somber vision of an old Viking warrior that recalls the endemic fear of what might happen if Europe abandons individuality in favour of the nation or the fate of the people, fascism-style. Most Swedish art museums would probably have shuddered at the thought of showing such a charged work. Indeed, would they even have dared to take on something as ’conservative’ as a contemporary Romantic trend? In the end, what’s at stake is art’s right to be art. That and the viewer’s right to be addressed as an equal individual rather than as a consumer of spectacular art experiences or as someone yearning to react without thinking for themselves. Personally, I didn’t expect to be moved by Baade’s worn-out old warrior, but I was.
So does The Romantic Eye establish “a new benchmark of quality” for contemporary art, as Vistrup Madsen puts it in his essay? At least, it’s the most interesting proposal I have seen at a Swedish museum for a very long time. Sure, the contemporary selection could have been even sharper. The new paintings do well in the encounter with the historical pieces, but there are also solitary elements such as Lars Nilsson’s silhouette pictures that allude to the fragment aesthetic of the 1980s. Other contemporary works include Mariele Neudecker’s evocative dioramas and videos about the climate crisis, and Oscar Furbacken’s peep show revealing hidden wonders behind the anonymous surface of a rock-like structure. Indeed, the National Museum’s casting of contemporary art as part of the European Enlightenment tradition is an act of resistance against commercial spectacle, American cultural imperialism and rampant anti-intellectualism.
For my part, I have always been sceptical about Romanticism, but just as The Romantic Eye opened, Sweden’s foremost neo-Romantic poet, Bruno K. Öijer, published his first collection in a decade. On the penultimate page is a poem that summarises what is at stake: “I had it in me / I looked through the cracks in the curtain / I looked miles into the Unknown / and the Unknown looked back at me / no words were needed / our gazes said it all / nothing could come between us.” If what we’re seeing today is the outline of a new Romanticism, then I’d be fine with that.
