The Monk by the Sea

The picture is made by removal, and what is left resists removal almost entirely. Take the monk and the canvas becomes a weather study, a sea with no one to face it. Take the strip of shore and he has nowhere to stand and the viewer no ground. Take the dark band of sea and the sky has no depth to fall into: it is that band, nearly black, that makes the sky’s height felt. The scale is compelled: smaller, the emptiness would be a vignette; much larger, a decoration. The test bites in one place, the gulls, which could go though they give the only scale of the air and its only motion. They and the exact disposition of the cloud are permitted rather than required.

Score: 8.8 / 10

What can be stated: a human being stands before the boundless with nothing between, no church, no ship, no foreground, no frame of convention, and the picture puts the viewer in the same place. The monk, whose order exists to mediate between man and God, stands at the end of the land with no rite and no text, only the sky. That proposition holds and was new: the religious relation as solitary, unmediated exposure, shared by the one who looks. Held below the bar on two counts. Much of what the canvas gives is a state, desolation, awe and suspension, which ranks below a meaning. And whether the sky is a presence or an absence, faith or its loss, the picture does not decide.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The sublime is the subject, and it is the cold sublime of magnitude and void, Kant’s mathematical sublime made a picture. Height is at the top of the medium. The sky rises from the dark sea in a gradation from near black at the horizon through grey and mist to a pale clearing high up, so that the eye climbs the whole canvas without finding a resting point, and the monk’s smallness against it is the measure of terror. The register is single and held across the whole field. What keeps the axis below the top is frequency: there is one elevation, total and unbroken, and no second summit within the picture. It is one sublime instant, not a work that rises again and again.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The archetypes are present and some are built. The figure at the edge of the world, the shore as the threshold between the known and the boundless, between land and water, life and what lies beyond it: the composition is that threshold, the three bands are its structure, and the figure stands on the last of the land. The monk is the contemplative, the soul alone before God, his black habit the one dark upright against the horizontals. That much bears load, and the particular stays particular: a Baltic shore, a real sea and weather. What holds the axis below the gate is that the myth is one figure and one gesture, and its deeper readings, the monk as the painter himself, the pendant’s burial completing the life, are brought from outside the canvas.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is the composed landscape and the marine as Claude and the Dutch fixed them: a repoussoir at the side, coulisses stepping back, a middle ground, ships to measure the sea, a framed horizon. The departure is total. There is no repoussoir, no coulisse, no middle ground, nothing at the sides; the horizon runs unbroken from edge to edge; the foreground is, in effect, the frame itself. No painting in the European tradition before it had dared a field so nearly empty at this size. The stake was public: it was shown at the Berlin Academy, where the absence of the expected structure was the talk around it. Held below the top because the cost was risked rather than paid: the king bought it, and the painter was elected to the Academy.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Substitute a different form and the knowledge goes. The work knows that a person is exposed to the boundless with nothing to hold, and it knows it only as this field: the missing repoussoir leaves the viewer no edge to stand behind, and the unbroken horizon means the eye cannot leave the picture by a side. The proportion of sky to land is the proportion of the unknown to the known. The figure’s size is the argument: double it and he is a figure in a landscape; halve it and he is lost, and there is no one to stand with. The wide format against the one upright is the meeting of a person and the infinite. Held below the top because the dark, worked surface, glazes laid and relaid over two years and now darkened, is not wholly the instrument.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Evidence over promise: two centuries, and the questions remain open. Whether the picture is devout or a picture of God’s absence. Whether the monk is the painter, and whether he looks out or meditates with head bowed. Whether the pendant must be read with it, and in which order. What the text of 1810 in the Berliner Abendblätter, Kleist’s recasting of others’ words, says about the picture and what about Kleist. Whether the canvas is the first abstract landscape, as the line from Friedrich to Rothko claims, or a theological picture read backward through modernism. The restoration of the pair renewed the discussion of its surface and tone. Held a step below the highest because the central experience is agreed, and a share of the literature turns on the pendant and the later reception more than on the field.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Shown publicly in 1810, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: a reorganisation of what a landscape could be, the subject become the field itself, a near empty field, and the viewer’s relation to it the content. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: an immediate literary response, the Abendblätter text of October 1810, a founding document of Romantic writing on painting; a narrow following in painting, Dahl, Carus, Kersting and a Dresden circle; the painter’s name in neglect from his death in 1840 until the Berlin Centenary exhibition of 1906; and Robert Rosenblum’s Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko of 1975, which made this canvas the ancestor of the field painting of Rothko and Newman. The reach is delayed, and in part a critic’s genealogy rather than a documented debt; it is credited and discounted.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Survival weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole and legible: the field, the figure and the three bands are all there. Presence: in the Prussian royal collection from 1810 and then the national collection in Berlin, never dispersed, and through the Second World War; but for some sixty years after the painter’s death it was little regarded, and its standing now is a recovery. The fabric is charged: the surface is cracked and darkened, the glazes have changed, and the sky’s first tone is in part a matter of inference, though the restoration of the pair removed yellowed varnish and recovered much of it. At 216 years it sits just past the band of two centuries. Wide presence earns its tenth; the long neglect and the fabric take it back.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged as command of oil on canvas at a middle scale. The making bears the load in the sky: a gradation from near black at the horizon through misted grey to a pale opening above, built in thin layered glazes so that the air reads as depth without a single drawn form. The transitions are the picture. The sea band is held at the edge of darkness without going dead, and the figure is laid in with economy, its placement exact. The craft is careful, slow and glaze-built, not virtuoso: no passage of drawing or touch carries the work as the stroke carries a Van Gogh sky. The costs: the surface, worked and reworked over two years, carries the marks of that labour; the dune and shore are summary; the darkening of the glazes is partly the technique’s own.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the pale opening high in the sky and the small dark figure on the light shore at the bottom. They obey one law. Everything in the field is a band or a point against a band, horizontal extension against a single upright, light above against dark at the horizon. The gulls are points of the same kind, the monk the largest of them. Nothing in the picture is drawn by another law: no ornament, no anecdote, no detail rendered for its own sake. The range is real, from the near black sea to the pale sky, from the void to the one human. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory the law governs is deliberately small: one shore, one figure, three bands.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The orders held: the natural order, in sea, sky, shore and weather; the cosmos, as the boundless sky; the sacred, in the monk and in what he faces; and consciousness, his and the viewer’s, which is the work’s medium. They are integrated, and the single figure before the field places each. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is most of what the rubric lists: no family, no labour, no city, no state, no history, the human world reduced to one man with his back to us. The monastic order is implied by the habit and by nothing more. Water Lilies holds four orders in its own empty field and stands on this axis at the same 6.5. The emptiness is the form’s choice, and the figure describes the form.

Score: 6.5 / 10