The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Caspar David Friedrich · Das Eismeer, the German title by which the canvas is known · oil on canvas, a little under a metre high and about a third wider than high · a stack of broken ice slabs thrust up on a diagonal to an apex left of centre, the crushed hull of a ship half buried at its right, distant bergs on a level sea of ice, and an open pale sky · painted about 1823 to 1824 · Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg · the work scored is the single canvas, the painter’s studies of ice floes context
Mode
The shipwreck picture with its storm, its figures and its motion removed; landscape as an architecture of planes and fractures, the human present only as a trace
Mythos
The tomb raised over the dead, a cairn or pyramid of ice with the wreck inside it; the voyage past the last coast that does not return; the end of the world, where the sea becomes stone
Phase
After the event: the ice thrown up and stilled, the ship already taken, nothing left in motion; painted about 1823 to 1824
Presentation
Oil on a canvas a little under a metre high, wider than high; a smooth surface with the stroke suppressed, built in thin layers; buff, ochre and grey in the lit faces of the slabs, cold blue and green in the shadowed faces and the distance, a pale blue and white sky
Register
Cold awe and desolation: the sublime of time stopped, the terror not of a storm but of what remains after one
Scale
One wrecked hull against a stack of ice and a horizon of bergs, the human trace well under a twentieth of the field
Governing Proposition
Across the bottom of a canvas a little under a metre high lie flat broken slabs of ice, the ground the viewer stands on; from them a mass of slabs thrust up and stacked on a diagonal rises to a jagged apex left of centre, high into a pale sky. At the right foot of the stack, small and half buried, is the stern of a crushed ship, its planks drawn in the same hard planes as the ice. On the horizon at the right, distant bergs repeat the stack on a level sea of ice. There is no storm, no figure and no motion. The wager of the canvas is that the shipwreck picture can be made with its event, its people and its sea taken out, and that what remains, a ship become one slab among slabs, can show human enterprise not defeated by nature in combat but absorbed, without notice, into its building.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The canvas is oil, painted about 1823 to 1824, and it hangs in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. It is known by its German title, Das Eismeer. It is a little under a metre high and about a third wider than it is high, a mid-sized picture for so large a subject. The work scored is this one canvas, the image as it stands. The painter’s oil studies of ice floes are context, and they are not credited here.
What it shows takes a few sentences. Along the lower edge lies a foreground of broken flat slabs, the ground the viewer is given to stand on. From it a central mass of slabs, thrust up and stacked on a diagonal, rises to a jagged apex left of centre, high into the sky. At the right of the stack lies the one human trace in the picture: the hull of a ship, its stern and part of its side visible, crushed and half buried, small against the whole. On the horizon at the right, distant bergs stand on a level sea of ice. An open pale sky fills roughly the upper half. There is no figure anywhere.
The colour is held in a narrow and cold range. The slabs are grey, ochre and buff brown on their lit faces, cold blue and green in their shadowed faces and in the distance; the sky is a pale blue and white. There is no warm accent of any size. The viewer stands on the floe and not on a shore, so that the ice under the feet is the same ice that rises into the stack: there is no place in the picture outside what it shows.
Movement II
The inheritance is the shipwreck picture as the eighteenth century and the young Turner made it: the storms of Vernet and Loutherbourg, a sea in motion, sailors in peril, a narrative of struggle with a moral of courage or of pity. The canvas departs on every term. There is no storm, because the event is over. There is no figure, so there is no one to pity. There is no motion, because the sea has become solid. What is left is a geometry of planes and fractures, close to an architecture, with the human trace almost withdrawn. Landscape is made to carry what history painting carried.
The departure has a cost and a limit. The cost is borne in the painter’s standing, which fell through the 1820s and 1830s. The limit is that the turn was not made here for the first time. The Tetschen altar and the seascapes of the 1800s had already turned landscape from what it inherited, and the painter’s own The Monk by the Sea, at 8.6, had already emptied a sea of every inherited support. Part of the swerve was made before this canvas, and The Swerve stands at 9.0 and not above it.
Set beside The Raft of the Medusa, at 8.7, the shipwreck as history painting, the measure of the departure is plain. Géricault’s picture is the stronger disclosure, the deeper myth and the wider world: it has its figures, its scandal and its politics. The Sea of Ice has removed exactly those, and wins on the swerve and on the inner law, the terms on which it leaves the older picture behind. The two stand level. Turner’s The Slave Ship, at 8.6, is close on nearly every axis: Turner leads on the sublime and on what is left open, Friedrich on necessity, myth, swerve and law.
Movement III
The form is the knowledge. The work knows that the ice is a building and the ship a part of it, and it knows this only through the way it is made: the diagonal thrust of the stack, the slabs laid as planes, edge on edge, in the same hard drawing as the timbers of the hull, so that ship and ice are made of the same kind of thing. Make it a storm and it becomes the old picture of struggle. Make the wreck large and central and it is a disaster told; here it is a disaster found. Remove the bergs on the horizon and the order becomes local. Let the stack stand at the centre rather than rise to the left of it and it loses its thrust.
One law governs the field, the law of the plane and the fracture. Take the apex of the stack, towering in the upper field, and the far bergs on the horizon, small, level and nearly lost: they obey the same rule, and the distance between them is the meaning, the same order near and far. Take the ice and the ship, the two things most unlike in kind: the hull’s planks are drawn as slabs among slabs, and the human thing has become part of the natural structure. The sky alone stands outside the law of fracture, open and graded, and it is required as the ground against which the law is seen.
The making carries the law. Each fracture face is given its own plane of light, lit in buff and ochre, shadowed in a cold blue green, so that the stack reads as solid and the cold is seen in the colour. The surface is smooth and the stroke suppressed, built in thin layers, and the paint takes on the impersonality the subject asks for: no hand made this. The hull is drawn with a shipwright’s attention to plank and rib. The costs show at the edges. The stacking can look constructed, a geometry imposed on ice; the foreground spreads into slabs that are dry and repetitive and obey the law less strictly than the stack; and the distant bergs are summary. The Made stands at 8.9 for command complete in the stack and less so at the edges.
Movement IV
The archetype is the tomb, and the picture builds it. The stack is a cairn or a pyramid raised over the dead, and the wreck lies in it as the body lies in the barrow. Beneath the tomb is the voyage to the end of the world: the ship that goes past the last coast and does not return, the oldest form of overreaching. Both share one frame, the ice as the place where the sea itself becomes stone. The painter of crosses on mountains has made a grave with no cross on it. The sacred is present by the monument and by the absence of any sign.
What can be stated is this: human enterprise, sent out to the edge of the known world, is not beaten by nature in a fight but taken into its indifferent building. The ice makes the ship one more slab. Nature’s sublime is not, as the shipwreck pictures of the century before had made it, a stage for human heroism; it is an order that proceeds without us, and that holds well outside the decade of the painting. The picture is held short of the highest disclosure on two counts. Much of what it gives is a state, desolation and cold awe, and a state ranks below a meaning. And its meaning rests on a hull that is small and half hidden, so that the proposition is available rather than compelled; a viewer can miss the wreck, and many do at first. The Unconcealment stands at 8.4 for that.
The sublime is the coldest kind and reaches very high: a mass of broken ice rearing over the viewer, built by force and now perfectly still. The terror is not of a storm but of what is left after one, and the stillness is the height, the sublime of time stopped. It rises at the apex against the pale sky, in the blue shadowed faces, in the far bergs where the order repeats without end, and last in the hull, which turns the grandeur to dread. Yet the rise is essentially one, the stack seen from one place, and part of the sublime is size, on a canvas under a metre high. The Sublime stands at 8.9.
Movement V
The canvas was long confused with a lost picture of a ship wrecked on the coast of Greenland, and under that confusion it carried the title Die gescheiterte Hoffnung, The Wreck of Hope. The old title is part of the work’s reception and not the name of this canvas. It brought with it the reading of the picture as hope itself frozen, and with that the reading of a Germany whose hopes of liberty were stilled after 1819. Both are brought to the canvas from outside more than disclosed by it, and neither is credited in full.
The intrinsic force is very high. No landscape of the 1820s goes so far in removing the event and the figure from a picture of catastrophe. The reach is the discount: in its own decade the picture is not shown to have touched the field, while the painter’s standing fell. After his rediscovery it became one of the defining images of the Romantic sublime, and in 1975 Robert Rosenblum’s argument for a Northern Romantic tradition gave it a place in the line that runs toward abstraction. That reach is late and partly a critic’s genealogy, and Pressure on Tradition stands at 8.4 for force that is strong and reach that came late. The painter’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, at 8.4, stands below it, behind on the swerve and on the disclosure, its figure the more conventional device.
The questions stay open after about two centuries: whether the subject is a polar voyage, a river’s winter ice, or neither; whether the canvas is a political allegory; whether it is a grave without a cross; whether the stacked planes are near to Cubist structure, as the twentieth century found them. What the canvas holds is the natural order at its most elemental, a voyage in a hull, death and the tomb, the sacred by its absence, and the viewer placed on the floe. There is no person, no family, no labour, and no state except by allegory, and The Encompassed stands at 7.0. The Hunters in the Snow, at 8.7, the elder winter picture, holds a world and leads on the making, as it should; the Sea of Ice stands level with it, with the human world reduced to a few square centimetres of broken timber.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtraction, part by part. The stack cannot go: it is the picture, a monument raised by no hand. The wreck cannot go: without it the canvas is a study of ice, and with it the stack becomes a grave. The distant bergs cannot go: they repeat the stack at the scale of the world and say the thing is no accident of one place. The open sky is the picture’s only release and the measure of how high the ice reaches. The scale is compelled: larger, the wreck would become an incident. What gives is the bottom edge, where the foreground is more an inventory of slabs than a structure and two or three could move without loss.
Score: 8.8 / 10
What can be stated: human enterprise, sent out to the edge of the known world, is not defeated by nature in combat but absorbed into its indifferent building, and the ice makes of the ship one more slab. Nature’s sublime is not a stage for human heroism, as the shipwreck pictures of the century before made it, but an order that proceeds without us. That holds outside its decade. The reading of the picture as hope frozen, or as the stilled hopes of German liberty after 1819, is brought to the canvas more than disclosed by it. Held below the bar: much of what the picture gives is a state, desolation and cold awe, and the small, half hidden wreck makes the proposition available rather than compelled.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The sublime in its coldest register and at very great height: a mass of broken ice rearing over the viewer, built by force and now perfectly still, the violence finished. The terror is not of a storm but of what remains after one. The picture rises in more than one place: at the apex, sharp against the pale sky; in the shadowed blue faces where the cold is seen; in the far bergs, where the same order repeats without end; and last and smallest in the hull, which turns grandeur to dread. Held just below 9.0: the rise is essentially one, the stack seen from one place, and part of the sublime is size, on a canvas under a metre high.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The archetype is the tomb, and it is built, not alluded to. The stack is a cairn or a pyramid raised over the dead, and the wreck lies in it as the body lies in the barrow. A second pattern bears load too: the voyage to the end of the world, the ship that goes past the last coast and does not return, the oldest form of overreaching. The ice as the place where the sea itself becomes stone is the frame both share. The particular stays particular: the slabs are drawn as real ice and the hull is a ship’s hull, planked and shattered, not an emblem. No figure carries the myth, so the tomb is invited and never named, and the hope of the old title comes from outside.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the shipwreck picture as Vernet, Loutherbourg and the young Turner made it: a storm, a sea in motion, sailors in peril, a narrative of struggle with a moral of courage or pity. The departure is total on each term. No storm: the event is over. No figure: no one to pity. No motion: the sea has become solid. The drama is reduced to a geometry of planes and fractures, close to an architecture, the human trace almost withdrawn; landscape carries what history painting carried. The stake is borne in the painter’s standing, which fell through the 1820s and 1830s. Held at 9.0 rather than above, because the turn continues his own earlier departures, the Tetschen altar and the seascapes of the 1800s.
Score: 9.0 / 10
A different form would change almost everything the work knows. It knows that the ice is a building and the ship a part of it, and it knows this only through the form: the diagonal thrust of the stack, the slabs laid as planes, edge on edge, in the same hard drawing as the timbers of the hull, so that ship and ice are made of the same kind of thing. Make it a storm and it becomes the old picture of struggle. Make the wreck large and central and it is a disaster told; here it is a disaster found. Remove the horizon bergs and the order becomes local. The smooth surface, with no visible stroke, is knowledge too: no hand made this. Held at 9.0 for the foreground, which knows less than the stack.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise: about two centuries, much of it neglect, so that the literature is mostly of the twentieth century and after, and it has not closed. Whether the subject is a polar voyage, a river’s winter ice, or neither. The political reading of a frozen Germany after 1819. The religious reading of a grave without a cross, from a painter of crosses on mountains. The confusion with a lost picture of a wreck off Greenland and the old title it lent, itself a chapter of the work’s history. And the formal reading of the twentieth century, which found in the stacked planes something near to Cubist or abstract structure. Held below the top: the central meaning is agreed, much of the literature concerns the painter and his time, and an unpeopled picture offers fewer places to return to.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of German and European landscape of the 1820s. The intrinsic force is very high: the canvas reorganises what a picture of catastrophe could be, the event removed, the figure removed, nature presented as an order of planes and the human as a trace in it, and nothing in the landscape of its decade goes so far. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: on its own decade it is not shown to have reached the field at all, and the painter’s standing was falling; after his rediscovery it became one of the defining images of the Romantic sublime, and Robert Rosenblum’s Northern Romantic genealogy of 1975 gives it a place before abstraction. Strong force, late and partial reach.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two centuries. Form: the image is the image the painter made, and no loss that touches its meaning is claimed. Presence: the charge falls here. The canvas passed a long stretch in obscurity while its painter’s name lapsed; it hangs now in Hamburg, and since the rediscovery it has become among the most reproduced of Romantic images; an image retrieved after long neglect and kept at the centre since is itself evidence. Fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: lining and cleaning are the ordinary history of an oil of its age, and no damage to the image is claimed. The long obscurity is weighed against the widest presence since.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged as command of oil on a mid-sized canvas. The making bears the load: the slabs are drawn with precision, each fracture face given its own plane of light, the lit faces in buff and ochre and the shadowed in a cold blue green, so that the stack reads as solid and the cold is seen in the colour. The surface is smooth and the stroke suppressed, built in thin layers, and the paint becomes the impersonality the subject requires. The whole is held in a narrow, cold range without going dead, and the sky is graded so that the apex cuts. The hull is drawn with a shipwright’s attention to plank and rib. The costs: the stacking can look constructed, parts of the foreground are dry and repetitive, and the distant bergs are summary.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the apex of the stack, towering high in the field, and the far bergs on the horizon at the right, small, level, nearly lost. They obey one law, the law of the plane and the fracture, and the distance between them is the picture’s meaning: the same order near and far. Take the two most distant in kind, the ice and the ship. They obey the same law; the hull’s planks are drawn as slabs among slabs. The sky is the one element outside the law of fracture, open and graded, and it is required as its ground. The range is wide for one canvas, from the floe under the viewer’s feet to the horizon. What resists is the foreground’s looser spread.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The orders held in one field: the natural order at its most elemental, sea become stone; human enterprise and its history, the voyage of discovery, in the hull; death, in the wreck and in the tomb the ice builds over it; the sacred, implied by the monument and by its absence, a grave with no sign; and the viewer’s consciousness, placed on the floe. They are integrated, and the one law of fracture holds each. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour seen, no state except by allegory, history only as an implied voyage. The human world is a few square centimetres of broken timber. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 9.1, with The Swerve and The Living Form at 9.0. An image whole after about two centuries and kept at the centre since its retrieval from long neglect; one law of plane and fracture binding the apex to the far bergs and the ship to the ice; the shipwreck genre with its storm, its figures and its motion removed; and a form in which the knowledge, that the ship is one slab among slabs, exists only because hull and ice are drawn in the same hard planes.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: the natural order, a voyage, death, the sacred by its absence and a consciousness are held, and person, family, labour and state are absent, the human world a few square centimetres of broken timber. Above it, and below the rest, The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4: much of what the picture gives is a state, and its meaning rests on a hull small and half hidden; and its reach on its own decade is not shown, its influence late and in part a critic’s genealogy. The two are one fact: the picture withdraws the human almost entirely, and what it withdraws it can neither state at full force nor carry into its own time.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Swerve at 9.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 each fall short by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. The twelve sum to 103.8, an average of 8.65 that displays 8.7, below the 9.0 the summit also requires; the standing in Tier IV is settled on the gate and on the aggregate alike.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas in the Hamburger Kunsthalle (the foreground slabs, the stack rising to its apex, the crushed hull at its right, the distant bergs, the cold palette and the open sky) and of its later life. No image, technical report or written source was consulted. The work scored is the single canvas, Das Eismeer, oil, painted about 1823 to 1824, a little under a metre high and about a third wider than high, scored as the image as it stands; its lining and cleaning are the ordinary history of an oil of its age, and no damage to the image is claimed. Not in the unit, and neither scored nor credited: the painter’s oil studies of ice floes, and the lost picture of a wreck on the coast of Greenland, with which the canvas was long confused and whose title, Die gescheiterte Hoffnung, it carried. Nothing is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the exact dimensions, where and in which winter the ice studies were made, where the studies now are, the picture’s first exhibition, its fate on the market in the painter’s lifetime and its path to Hamburg, the year of its acquisition and of the exhibition that restored the painter’s name, the events of the painter’s youth and the polar voyages that are often named as the occasion of the subject, and whether a ship’s name can be read on the stern.