Per Kirkeby | Caspar Wolf

And it was probably an important event, a coincidence with a fateful character, a concurrence (the law of series), when a kind soul sent me the well-documented catalogue of an exhibition in the Kunstmuseum in Basel: Caspar Wolf (1735 - 1783), - one of my old favourites - "Landschaft im Vorfeld der Romantik". This is exactly the landscape in which Saussure moves. And you do not need a map there. Wolf did not paint farmers at harvest time and did not paint rapturous park landscapes like the ordinary rococo painters. He rather continued the lines of the great Italian mannerists like Rosa and Magnasco, but where those let a storm blow over the populated landscape and demonized it, Wolf dealt with the deserted, human-free landscape. He painted glaciers and high mountains. He made pictures out of the upheaval that pervades the reading of Saussure. Wavering and uncertain, but increasingly praising and ecstatic, the romantic insight - and science. "One sees nothing but undeveloped, barren and characterless mountains. It is a dull and dreary sight, in no way generous, and scientifically uninteresting." The lack of size and science leads to good rationalism: "Although the glaciers look beautiful and unique, and although they are useful as water reservoirs, one can be annoyed by the space they occupy and by the fact that beautiful valleys and alpine pastures are lost in the process". And then the upheaval, the path that leads across many question marks and through horror: "How can this mixture of wonder and horror be transferred into the soul of the reader, which one feels when looking at these enormous masses of ice, which in turn seem almost inconspicuous in the crushing embrace of the mountains surrounding them? The horrifying question, which corresponds to the daring with which Caspar Wolf frees the pictorial space from the usual instruments and gives way to the empty question of the Rhone glacier. The horrible question, which finally leads to one's own insight or the "philosophy" of emptiness and desolation: "The peace and deep silence that dominated the great expanses were intensified by my imagination and had an uncanny effect on me. It seemed to me as if I was the only one who had survived the universe and seen his corpse lying at my feet. The corpse of the universe. This is how Wolf viewed the Alpine landscape: as a landscape of ruins - ruins of a prehistoric nature.

Excerpt from: Die Alpen (p. 100 ff.), in: In Nebel aufgelöste Wasser des Stromes - Hommage à Caspar Wolf, Aarau 1991. Edited by Beat Wismer and the Aargauer Kunsthaus on the occasion of the exhibition In Nebel aufgelöste Wasser der Stromes - Hommage à Caspar Wolf, 17.2.-7.4.1991.