JOANNA SHEERS SEIDENSTEIN: So much to say about this beautiful drawing. It is as powerful and affecting as his most ambitious paintings.

NARRATOR: Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, assistant curator of Drawings and Prints and co-curator of the exhibition.

SHEERS SEIDENSTEIN: You have this fragment, this castle wall, which still stands today. It's all about this tension between the built form and the centuries of history, that the structure and its dilapidation imply with the cycles of nature, with this tree that’s growing out of its foundation and perhaps even taking over.

You have this idea of human history, human ambition, human destruction within the larger rhythms, cycles of nature.

Because of the way he renders the clouds, there’s this dreamlike quality and the fact that it's isolated on the sheet. And he places it on this slope. And so, he gives it this drama with this hill and with this background. I'm obsessed with this drawing, as Alison knows.

NARRATOR: Look around and you’ll see the ways Friedrich’s fascination with the cycles of nature manifest across his drawings and paintings. Co-curator Alison Hokanson asks us to pay close attention to his depiction of moments of transition in these works:

HOKANSON: Is it winter turning into spring? Is it summer turning into fall? Is it sunrise? Is it sunset? Is it moonrise? Is the moon setting? I have to think that’s deliberate, right? And he's deliberately leaving that ambiguity in place because that affects how we respond to the scene, our interpretation of the landscape.

NARRATOR: These depictions of nature’s rhythms emphasize themes of death and rebirth—universal realities that had additional meaning for Friedrich, who lived through decades of war, and rebuilding in its aftermath.

His works evoke the patterns of nature that endure well beyond a month, a year, or even a human lifetime.

SHEERS SEIDENSTEIN: Altogether, the section shows these different temporalities. So, ruins, but then also cycles that are more enduring or less calculable, kind of rhythms of nature, of the cosmos.

ALUA ARTHUR: Every death is also a beginning, often a birth into something.

NARRATOR: Alua Arthur is a death doula, the founder of Going with Grace and the author of Briefly Perfectly Human.

ARTHUR: I saw a video recently about the caterpillar’s process into becoming a butterfly. Then I spent some time thinking about all the dying that has to occur, all the transforming that needs to occur. But much like the caterpillar must become the butterfly, the caterpillar must die for the butterfly to thrive and exist.

Dying things are everywhere. And some of them we get to see the beauty that's made after the death, but some we don’t and we will stay forever curious.

MARIE HOWE: We’re alive and we’re dying. We’re here and one day we won't be.

NARRATOR: Poet Marie Howe is a professor, former New York State poet laureate and the author of What The Living Do.

HOWE: Death is the mother of beauty, Wallace Stevens says. Death is the mother of beauty.

ARTHUR: There’s an utter perfection in the cycles of the natural world that humans have really tried to circumvent or cut through somehow, or shortcut, forgetting that we are nature ourselves.

Everything dies. Everything dies.

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Music: Schubert, Winterreise, Op. 89, D. 911 (Arr. for Oboe, Bassoon & Piano): No. 1, Gute Nacht, performed by Bence Bogányi, Gergely Bogányi. Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc.