"Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century"

Even though it’s been over two months since I read Peter Schjeldahl’s stimulating piece on the Met’s “Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century” (“Inside Story,” The New Yorker, May 2, 2011), I find myself still grappling with what he meant by “otherizing” (“It needs only a sense of external reality that is not other to the self but, rather, otherizing”). I see Sanford Schwartz, in his excellent review of the same show (“Looking into the Beyond,” The New York Review of Books, June 9, 2011), agrees with Sabine Rewald’s interpretation of the “open window” pictures. He says, “Sabine Rewald writes that the open window, as Friedrich and some of her other artists saw it, is about ‘yearning’ and ‘unfulfilled longing,’ and surely this is right.” You’ll recall that Schjeldahl held that “the notion of longing reduces the complexity of Friedrich.” Both Schwartz and Schjeldahl hazard other constructions, as well. For example, Schwartz says, “As his window drawings make clear, Friedrich’s deepest subject was not the force and pageant of nature but our response to it – how we literally approach the world from outside ourselves – and it took him years to find a way to express this most fully.” It’s fascinating to read the thoughts of these two great critics as they attempt to tease out the meaning of Friedrich’s window views. Both seem to reach for psychological explanations. But I wonder if the meaning isn’t right there on the surface, in the precision of the drawings, in the depiction of light coming in the windows.

Postscript: Since posting the above, I’ve read Peter Campbell’s excellent “Am I intruding?” (London Review of Books, November 3, 2011), a review of Sabine Rewald’s Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century. Regarding Friedrich’s window pictures, Campbell notes “Friedrich’s cool insistence that you enter his anonymous space and find its unspecified meaning for yourself.” He says, “It isn’t the painting itself but the stage it offers the imagination that is effective.” He talks about “Friedrichian poetics” – the poetry of solitude, of “feelings about being alone in a bare room.” He says, “The exercise Friedrich’s window pictures offer the imagination comes more often with poetry. Most obviously, in the last lines of Larkin’s ‘High Windows’” (“And immediately / Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: / The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless”).