Praise Kier! Decoding DOGE with Caspar David Friedrich.
When professionalism is outlawed, only outlaws will be professional.
If you love American art and Apple+’s Severance, a show of Caspar David Friedrich at the Met has landed at just the right moment. But what can the great painter of the sublime teach us about Elon Musk?
“He could slip”—Optics and Design painted it with the brushes of Caspar David Friedrich, Asher Durand, and Thomas Cole. Screen grab from Apple+’s Severance, season 1, episode 4, “The You You Are.”
“In some ways his pictures are about looking together.”1
The Met’s Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, on through May 11, offers ample support for this bit of wall-text. Nearly every canvas radiates the eery euphoria of floating with the artist over twilit landscapes. Friedrich didn’t invent this technique, but good heavens did he harness it to transcendent effect. Every Friedrich is a painting of looking with someone else—even the breathtakingly beautiful Ruins at Oybin, which features no figures2—because we are looking at the scene with Caspar David Friedrich—together.
But then there’s a way in which that togetherness is more literal: Friedrich’s specialty, in fact. Rückenfigur is the device of showing us the back of a figure within the picture—as in his Friedrich’s most famous composition, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, along with a string of other “Wanderer” pictures. Friedrich didn’t invent this device either, but look up “Rückenfigur” in the wikipedia and it’ll be Friedrich’s Rücken staring at you:
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818, oil on canvas.
In Friedrich’s milieu, this was the ultimate gesture of the sublime: a counter-Enlightenment ideal of a subjective, supernatural world, shrouded in mist and mystery. It’s beautiful, and a little scary: consider the heart of this Romantic period as stretching roughly from Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which romanticizes suicide, to Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which romanticizes Frankenstein. Friedrich was a naturalist, in a way—a late drawing of rocks is so sumptuously rendered that you wonder what more anyone could want from a subject—but you can feel, in the most sensitive studies of a tree, a resistance to the rapacious Enlightenment lens that saw a clockwork world of material resources.
There’s so much in that Rückenfigur—turning away from the picturesque, and toward the slightly scary. Consider the sentimental pictures of cows and peasants that were enjoying a hay day in England at the time. Lauren Kroiz summarizes the picturesque “as an aesthetic category, was first formulated in late eighteenth-century England to celebrate the British rural landscape, which occupied the aesthetic ground between the beautiful (calmingly serene) and the sublime (threatening and awe-inspiring).”
“Its visual pleasures were variety, roughness, and irregularity . . . The picturesque sentimentalized and aestheticized the upper class’s voyeuristic experience of the working classes; in England its celebration of variety and irregularity memorialized the passing of a way of rural life at the same time that it justified an efficient transformation of the countryside.”3
All of which landed in America a little sideways. We didn’t have to sentimentalize a vanishing countryside because, in fact, our countryside was growing—it was the wild that was vanishing, and, in 1825, at too slow a clip to worry anyone in America.4 The sublime helped to sentimentalize that wild, and so, while America developed a picturesque repertoire—cows in a river; an old mill; minstrel shows—we also grafted Friedrichian sublime onto our wild. And in that picturesque/sublime, we get not a full Rückenfigur, but more a three-quarters Rücken, from Asher B. Durand in 1849:
Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849.
Durand was an engraver until a patron encouraged him to consider painting in oil; that same patron paid Durand’s way to Europe in 1830, where he was swept up in the wake of the Romantic spirit, and brought it home to share with his good pal, Thomas Cole. The English-born Cole enjoyed the support of the same patron; it is Cole, alongside his friend, the poet and newspaperman William Cullen Bryant, that is depicted in Durand’s masterpiece. The picture is very American in its fusion of wild and tame; Cole mixed up a similar potion in a painting of the White Mountains a few years earlier, and he makes explicit what his painting hints at:
“There is a union of the picturesque, the sublime, and the magnificent; there the bare peaks of granite, broken and desolate, cradle the clouds . . . and the traveller . . . sees the sublime melting into the beautiful, the savage tempered by the magnificent.”5
The scary part of the sublime melts away until you just have something beautiful. It’s hard to imagine the sublime without the scary, but Cole was working on something in the picture. And if you take the picture that Cole was talking about—The Oxbow—and cross it with Kindred Spirits, you get the picture of Kier Eagan:
I can’t imagine executive producer Ben Stiller was aware of this, but the name of the patron who instilled Cole and Durand with a taste for the sublime?
His name just happened to be Luman.
III. Shut out.
Maybe we always look at a Friedrich “together”—but there’s another way: looking alone at a figure who is alone. Cole and Bryant are in the wilderness looking at the wilderness—we’re looking at them. And this isn’t limited to the Rückenfigur device, as Karl Kusserow writes in Nature’s Nation:
“Whereas artists of the picturesque encouraged access and entry into the surrounding environment—a move with its own imperial ramifications—artists of the sublime shut us out.”6
Which is an excellent technique for a quasi-religious office cult like Lumon. You imagine yourself as the figure in the painting—he can be a romantic ideal, a model, someone to measure oneself against; but you are also closed off from him, for he has something you don’t. He is there, and you’re not. What better message to send to the Macro Data Refiners? Admire the achievement of upper management, with the vague sense that you’re joining him, along with the un-interrogated certainty that you will not.
The darkest fear of Severance7 is that our work-selves are better than our off-duty selves. And whether it’s exactly true or not, undeniably we, the professional class, are all products of our work. Work tells us to do what we do most of our wakeful lives; our jobs shape our character, and define at least a sizable chunk of our identities, for better or for worse.
At the same time Cole and Durand were painting their rugged-individualist masterpieces, they were also developing the notion of the artist as a professional, like a doctor or lawyer. Making these cryptic, careful images requires years of training, and neither Cole nor Durand, nor any of their colleagues at the school they founded believed that “the sublime” just landed on you one day. What art in America needed most, they reasoned, was an academy—a place to intitute rigorous study and then reward its achievement with a certificate and a few letters to put after your name. And then the great, mist-shrouded journey of the artist could begin in earnest.
The last few months have seen a weird assault on professionalism from the President of the United States and Elon Musk, a man whose role in government is not entirely clear. These two people are a lot of things—businessmen, entrepreneurs—but they’re not professionals. The fetish is the Friedrich character—the loner who accesses the sublime, Kier knows how, and sees the truth by piercing the fog of appearances. They access a landscape that we cannot—the Rückenfigur. And the rest of us stare at the Rücken.
Two people who believe that professionalism is nothing more than leveraging privilege—two people who, for different reasons, cannot imagine that anything productive is taking place at the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts, the Kennedy Center, USAID—that it’s all waste. This is the worldview of someone who hasn’t bothered to peek inside and look at any of the details, to instead be comforted by a broad-brush view of the “swamp,” the con, the inefficiency—while the little minds of the professionals who must parse these details can’t possibly comprehend the sublime view from their craggy redoubt.
We actually do something down here in data refinement. I’ve hated my job at moments in my life, and my point here is not to prop up the Protestant Ethic or the joy of toil—there’s nothing I hate more than wasting my time. But there’s a sick dream that professionals are too small to see the big picture that is available to the sublime wizards.
We’d actually have a great view if you’d move your Rücken out of the way.
Elsewhere.
I’m thrilled to contribute to the Boston Globe's Ideas section this weekend, highlighting one of the extraordinarily efficient (and vastly under-sung) initiatives undertaken by the federal government—the National Endowment for the Arts’s object indemnity program.
Apologies to our Hoosier readers—last week’s post, Cancelling the Klan, misstated the name of Indiana University. We’ve corrected it in the archives.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
Jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
As quoted in the exhibition wall text, available here.
Worth the trip just for this one painting, and there are a half dozen “minor” ink drawings about which you could say the same. Reproduction does nothing for Ruins at Oybin, you just have be there.
Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites, p . 20.
Anyone, that is, apart from the inhabitants of the wild, but their concerns wouldn’t meet sympathetic European ears for another half century at best.
Thomas Cole, Essay on American Scenery, 1841, full text here.
Karl Kusserow, “The Trouble with Empire,” Nature’s Nation, p. 129.
Okay, one of the dark fears on a show with so many. The outtie world is awful, the innie world is awful, so it’s a race to the bottom, and not very comforting viewing.