Caspar David Friedrich at the German Centenary Exhibition of 1906 The Sensation of the Century
The great discovery of the exhibition was Caspar David Friedrich. Presented were altogether 93 of his paintings and drawings. The 36 paintings hung in two cabinets on the second story of the Nationalgalerie, with 57 drawings displayed in the galleries of the Neues Museum nearby.
Floor plan of the Nationalgalerie with the spatial plan of the German Centenary Exhibition 1906
The curators Lichtwark and Tschudi first became aware of Friedrich through the Norwegian art historian Andreas Aubert. He was the first to publish material on Friedrich in 1893, the chapter on Friedrich only appeared in German in 1895.
Originally, Aubert was researching the (now lesser-known) Norwegian landscape painter Johann Christian Clausen Dahl and it was through him that Aubert first stumbled on the paintings of Friedrich. The two artists lived for many years in the same house in Dresden, and were close friends.
Peter Behrens, exhibition architecture for the German Centenary Exhibition of 1906: second story, Caspar David Friedrich gallery.
Revolutionary as well was the style of presentation: the pictures were hung in just two rows, one above the other, on white backgrounds. Was this perhaps the birth of the so-called white cube?!
Selection of works by Friedrich exhibited at the German Centenary Exhibition
In a letter, Alfred Lichtwark, director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, characterizes the enormous impact of Friedrich’s pictures on 20th-century viewers:
“The Friedrich gallery will probably be the most striking one in the exhibition, and our [Hamburg] group, as far as I can see, will have the most powerful sound.”
The Hamburger Kunsthalle sent The Sea of Ice, Mountain Landscape in Bohemia, Neubrandenburg in Flames, Ploughed Field, and Meadows near Greifswald to Berlin as loans for the exhibition.