After the Anthropocene: Caspar David Friedrich's "Two Men by the Sea."
By Jake Erlewine
“The ground opened, threw out water, and then closed again.” When Charles Lyell wrote this description of a volcanic tsunami in his 1830 Principles of Geology, the physical effects of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora had subsided, but its impact on European culture had not. The largest observed volcanic eruption in recorded history shot 10 billion metric tons of long-buried stone into the atmosphere, reducing the mountain in height by 4200 feet and killing 70-100,000 people in its immediate vicinity. Over the next year, tephra from the eruption spread across the planet, blocking sunlight from penetrating the atmosphere and darkening the globe. Despite Lyell’s remark that “we should scarcely have heard of Europe of this tremendous catastrophe,” its aftereffects choked and starved the Continent: temperatures in Europe plunged by 2-3° Celsius in 1816, resulting in its worst famine of the nineteenth century.
The ensuing crop shortages, termed by John D. Post as “the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world,” caused riots across the French countryside and tripled the price of grain in Zurich. The far-reaching nature of the Tambora eruption makes clear that this was a planetary event on multiple levels – it was ash made from the very foundation of the planet that was causing a global crisis – and cements it as an enduring reminder that “the impression that deep-seated forces of the earth can leave on social worlds is out of all proportion to the power of social actors to legislate over the lithosphere.” In other, starker terms, it was a reminder of the finitude of the Anthropocene. Therefore, I will argue through an exploration of Caspar David Friedrich’s 1817 Two Men by the Sea (Zwei Manner am Meer) (fig. 1) that landscape painting during this period, rather than depicting a will to survive, exemplified a fear of ecological collapse. As Germany was enveloped within a layer of tephra, bringing artists face to face with the Earth’s inhuman past, Friedrich represented this fear visually by engaging with contemporary ideas on the formation of the Earth, confronting the ominous reality that a world without humans not only could exist but has existed before.
Figure 1: Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men by the Sea (Zwei Manner am Meer), 1817. Oil on canvas. 66 x 81 cm. Credit: Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
The figures stand on a rocky foreground, looking out onto a broad sea lit by a rising moon. Friedrich places his vanishing point just below the moon, which itself is simultaneously revealed and occluded by the atmosphere. Like his earlier 1810 seascape Monk by the Sea, the inverse diagonals found in the sky are mirrored by the obtuse, shallow diagonals of the rocky foreground area, a motif which Joseph Leo Koerner argues in the earlier work symbolizes the path to transcendence through nature. This forms a convincing reading of Two Men – the absence of a true middleground and the breaking of diagonals with the horizontal bands of the ocean could be taken to represent the impossibility of confirming the existence of God. When the moon, a representation of God, is blocked by the Rückenfiguren, our experience of the background is mediated through the lens of subjective viewers. While Koerner states that this closing-off of the landscape “forces the viewer to participate directly in what they see,” rendering the sublime as a subjective property rather than a property of landscape itself, the larger implication of Friedrich’s use of the Rückenfigur here pertains to another aspect of Kantian philosophy: asserting the place of God within the visible world.
Kant’s argument for belief in God relies solely on morality – in a world where moral virtue is the condition for happiness, a person cannot act on means to this end without believing that the underlying structure of the world is conducive to the achievement of virtue. Kant notably does not answer in either the affirmative or the negative; he merely positions God as a necessary assumption when discussing questions of morality. Thus, like Kant, Friedrich is not necessarily interested in proving or disproving the existence of God; rather, he engages with the symbolic structures that allow for spirituality, and more specifically how spectators inscribe this structure upon nature to fit a specific worldview. This dialectical conflation of immediate experience with mediation forms the basis for Friedrich’s observation that humans can only establish a correlation of the world through systems of representation, but the noumenal inherently eludes us. The central argument of Two Men by the Sea can be seen as an attempt to refute this worldview by depicting the possibility of a humanless world, separating the act of thinking from being. Friedrich accomplishes this primarily by engaging with the eruption of Tambora to bring his two spectators directly in contact with a pre-Anthropocene vision of Earth.
As previously mentioned, the 1815 eruption profoundly sabotaged the climate of Europe during the years 1816-7, creating a European agricultural landscape where being alive meant being hungry. In Germany, 1817 was known as ‘The Year of the Beggar’ (Jahr des Bettlers), as the return of Napoleonic veterans and the worldwide failure of crops contributed to near-starvation in the countryside. Carl von Clausewitz describes scenes of “decimated people, barely human, prowling the fields for half-rotten potatoes.” As the German landscape was faced with weather of cataclysmic proportions, perhaps this motivated Friedrich to paint a vision of the apocalypse. The formal effect of Tambora on his paintings is well-studied – a 2007 study revealed a high correlation level between the amount of red pigmentation in Friedrich’s works and the contemporary Dust Veil Index, or a measure of the rate at which volcanic ash blocks incoming solar radiation. In Two Men by the Sea, the sky appears vignetted by dark clouds, and what we can see burns in bright orange. While this could be posited as a formal depiction of the limits of human comprehension, the occlusion of the viewpoint by tephra must not be understood as metaphor, but as fact – this is a crisis that threatens humanity. This should not be understood as a scientific exercise on the part of Friedrich, but the portrayal of volcanism in his work does serve as a reminder of how Nature defies systematization. The mathematical or scientific principles depicted in Two Men by the Sea are therefore stretched to their ends to demonstrate the biosphere’s ease of negating them.
Perhaps the most powerful message of the work comes within this negation of human principles. In an intellectual culture that was so engrossed in the process of mining and mapping the lithosphere, Friedrich stands alone in inverting the dichotomy of sky and ground. By placing airborne geological material at the forefront of his image, Friedrich relinquishes the Anthropocene position atop the rock, leaving the two humans stratified between two layers of rock as if themselves minerals in a band of granite. Combined with their contemporary dress, this suggests a futurity within the painting, of something yet to happen. Two Men by the Sea is not an expression of the beginning of human life, but of its eventual demise at the hands of the planet.
In a historical period when humanity sought to exploit and profit from natural resources above and underground, the systematic destruction of the Anthropocentric notion of human infinity in Friedrich’s Two Men by the Sea is symbolic not only of the folly of this endeavor. It suggests prophetically that there will come a time when human action against climate change may be futile, and the Anthropocene will be rendered geologically rather than epistemologically. What Tambora comes to represent in the work of Friedrich, therefore, is the inevitability of humanity’s return to the earth not as its master, but entombed in ossuaries of a past age, bookending a small chapter in a vast volume of geological history. To return finally to Lyell’s description of Tambora’s tsunami, while it is true that humanity stands atop the layers of the earth’s crust, Friedrich harnesses through his work the power of the lithosphere to enclose us within it, as it has done since the formation of the planet.
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