Take a Closer Look

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog

By Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

Romanticism

This painting is Western Philosophy in a nutshell, isn’t it? It’s the go-to stock photo used every time something wants to brand itself as cerebral and dangerous. If you think you’ve never seen it before, congratulations, you’re about to experience the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. There won’t be a single day where this painting isn’t lurking somewhere. 

While developing this blog I used this work as a visual reference for our mainstream image of philosophy and the white men to which we ascribe all academic glory.

 Our hero here is tormented but triumphant; rising above nature’s volatile apathy. Well dressed with a walking cane in hand, he makes the absurd his bitch. Honestly, it’s a dope painting allegorizing the struggle to attain knowledge of nature and self. It completely tracks that a Post-Western enlightenment culture responds to the exhausted triumph this painting exudes. 

I’ve been equally transfixed by Wanderer Above the Sea Fog, but it’s precisely because we connect to this painting so deeply that we need to ask ourselves what’s missing from it.

We still see the absurd heroism of an introspective soul as a quality of white men and we will continue to use this default until works depicting knowing and nature center someone other than a milquetoast white dude. 

 In many ways, this painting is why I created the art gallery on Imagine Her Happy. We have the platonic image of a white man ascending into the transient heavens; but what about the rest of us?


Photo by The Waves of Poetry

This should-be iconic shot is from the 2019 film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Here, Héloïse is framed by jagged cliffs and ocean spray in an unmistakable reference to the painting.

It’s a mise en scène deliberately asserting the validity and depth of the feminine mind.

But with Portrait of a Lady on Fire, we are still seeing a Euro-centric journey of introspection and self, making it only the start of reframing our artistic image of the human condition.

If you know or are an artist working in portraits that capture this introspective energy Submit your work to the gallery! 

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