The Monk by the Sea

When Friedrich showed this at the Berlin Academy in 1810, viewers didn't quite know what to do with it. A painting was supposed to lead your eye in gently, past a tree or a rock at the edge, back into depth. Friedrich took all of that away. There is a thin strip of pale sand, one small dark figure of a monk with his hand to his head, and then almost the entire canvas is just sea and sky, an emptiness with nothing to hold on to. One writer said standing before it felt like having your eyelids cut off. The young playwright Heinrich von Kleist wrote a famous piece about it that same October, saying the picture made him feel utterly alone, as if he were the only living thing under a dead sky. That bareness was so far ahead of its time that people have called it, with only slight exaggeration, the first abstract painting. The Prussian king bought it and its companion piece straight from the exhibition. Friedrich painted the figure so small that when you finally find him, the sheer amount of sky above him becomes the whole subject.