Anyone who thinks of hiking as a motif in painting today will have Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” in mind. This outstanding loan from the Hamburger Kunsthalle forms the starting point for a special exhibition in the Alte Nationalgalerie, which traces this surprisingly central theme for art through the entire 19th century through to examples of classical modernism.
With Rousseau's slogan: Back to nature! and Goethe's Sturm und Drang poem, hiking around 1800 became an expression of a modern attitude to life. In view of the rapid social upheavals since the French Revolution, a countermovement is developing, a new form of decelerated knowledge of self and the world, which continues to have an impact today.
Since the Romantic period, artists have conquered nature on foot and from new perspectives. In art, hiking takes on the symbolic meaning of life's journey and symbolic pilgrimage. The self-determined walking journey opens up a new, intensive way of encountering nature and a sensual as well as physical form of appropriation of the world.
The works shown in the exhibition are by masters such as Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Blechen, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Johan Christian Dahl, Richard Wilson, Christen Købke, Gustave Courbet, Iwan Kramskoi, Ferdinand Hodler, Auguste Renoir, Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Dix and Ernst Barlach illustrate how powerful and fruitful the motif of hiking was not only in Germany, but from France, Great Britain via Denmark and Norway to Russia. The exhibition is thematically divided into different chapters: discovery of nature, life's journey, artists' hike, walks, Italy, the country of longing, hiking landscapes north of the Alps.