EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS

WHY ANTON CHEKHOV CAN CHANGE BUT CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH CANNOT

CATHERINE DAVIS

July 29, 2026

Why do we expect every generation to reinvent Anton Chekhov, yet recoil at the thought of altering a painting by Caspar David Friedrich? We take this for granted, as though it reflects the natural character of theater and painting. It does not. Instead, it reveals a profound differentiation in how we understand art, authenticity, and history—one that affects not only how we preserve works of art, but also what we believe it means for them to remain alive.

---

There are few things more ordinary than a new theatrical production of an old play. A theater announces Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1903–4). The estate has become a suburban shopping mall. Lopakhin arrives in an expensive Italian suit. Madame Ranevskaya drinks espresso instead of tea. The final act unfolds beneath fluorescent lights rather than the fading grandeur of a Russian country house. Reviews debate whether the production is convincing, whether the actors understand Chekhov, whether the director has discovered something new or merely imposed a fashionable idea upon an old text. Almost nobody asks a more fundamental question: By what right has any of this been changed?

The Cherry Orchard directed by Konstantin Stanislavski — Moscow Art Theatre, 1904. The original production, with Olga Knipper as Ranevskaya. It established the play’s international reputation, but Chekhov famously objected to Stanislavski's treatment of it as a mournful tragedy. Chekhov had called it a comedy, even a work containing farce. That disagreement has essentially defined the play's production history ever since.

The answer seems self-evident. Every generation stages Chekhov differently because every generation imagines itself differently. A play survives by entering the present. Its language may remain largely the same, but its rhythms, gestures, costumes, politics, and emotional temperature continually shift. There is no definitive Cherry Orchard, only a succession of performances that together constitute the work’s life. The history of theater is not the preservation of an object, but its continual reinvention.

Now imagine a museum making a similar announcement. Next month, visitors are informed, Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) will reopen after an ambitious intervention. The conservators have not merely cleaned the surface or repaired areas of damage. They have decided that the sky should be less dark. The mountain peaks have been rearranged to strengthen the composition. The figure has been turned slightly so that his posture feels more psychologically immediate to contemporary audiences. Nothing has been “forged”; every alteration has been carried out by artists of exceptional skill. The museum notes that Friedrich has not been betrayed, but renewed.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818. Oil on canvas, 94.8 × 74.8 cm

The proposal sounds absurd. Within hours it would provoke outrage. Newspapers would condemn it as vandalism. Art historians would demand resignations. Politicians might even intervene. The scandal would not concern the quality of the alterations. It would concern the very idea that a painting could be deliberately changed after its maker had laid down his brush. A play and a painting seem to offer opposite answers to the same question. What exactly survives?

When we leave the theater, nothing remains. The actors go home. The stage is dismantled. The lights are switched off. Tomorrow evening, everything will be assembled again, but it will not be quite the same. A pause will be held a little longer. A gesture will carry a different implication. Even the audience will alter the performance simply by being constituted of a different group of humans. Theater survives because nothing about it is permanent except the possibility of beginning again.

A painting appears to inhabit a different kind of time. It asks to remain exactly where it is. The cracks in the paint, the yellowing varnish, even the abrasions left by centuries of transport and neglect have become part of its identity. We no longer distinguish between the image and the object that bears it. They have become inseparable. Yet this distinction is less obvious than it first appears.

When does a play cease to be The Cherry Orchard? Is it when a scene is cut? When the language is translated? When the costumes become contemporary? No one seems able to answer, yet everyone recognizes the play when the curtain rises. The same uncertainty once existed in painting. There was a time when the image and the object were not understood as quite the same thing, when a painting could acquire a different sky, a brighter landscape, or a more graceful figure without losing its identity. The work endured, even if its appearance did not.

Somewhere along the way, that confidence disappeared.

It is tempting to think that paintings have always occupied the silent, timeless spaces we now call museums. They have not. For most of their history, paintings lived among people rather than before them. They hung in churches darkened by incense, in palaces that were continually refurbished, in private houses where fashions changed as readily as furniture. They were moved, reframed, cleaned, repaired, enlarged, reduced, and, on occasion, quietly altered. Their survival depended less on remaining untouched than on remaining meaningful.

The Cherry Orchard directed by Giorgio Strehler — Piccolo Teatro, Milan, 1974. Probably one of the great canonical European interpretations. Strehler's Il giardino dei ciliegi became famous for its extraordinary visual beauty and its treatment of the orchard almost as a landscape of memory.

The modern museum changed this relationship almost without anyone noticing. A painting no longer belonged primarily to a room or a ritual. It belonged to history. Visitors were invited to encounter it not as something that shared their own time but as something that had traveled intact from another one. The museum became a place where the past appeared to stand still.

Other inventions reinforced this new way of seeing. Photography accustomed people to the idea that every work possessed a definitive appearance, a single image against which all others could be measured. Conservation gradually shifted its ambition from recovering beauty to preserving evidence. Layers once regarded as distractions became historical documents. A crack in the paint was no longer simply damage; it was testimony. Even discoloration acquired a kind of dignity, for it proved that the object had endured.

The word “authenticity” also began to change its meaning. Earlier generations often understood authenticity as fidelity to the spirit or effect of a work. Increasingly, it came to mean fidelity to its material condition. The original surface acquired an authority that no later hand, however gifted, was permitted to challenge. To alter a painting was no longer to continue its history. It was to interrupt it. This was more than a technical revolution. It was a new way of imagining time itself.

Theater continued to renew its works by allowing them to enter the present. Museums, meanwhile, asked paintings to withdraw from the present altogether. They became witnesses rather than participants, objects to be approached with reverence rather than companions whose appearance might evolve alongside those who looked at them.

Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea (Der Mönch am Meer), 1808–10. Oil on canvas, 110 × 171.5 cm

It is difficult now to imagine any other arrangement. We have become so accustomed to the museum’s stillness that we mistake it for the natural condition of art. Yet it is worth remembering that permanence is not a quality inherent in paintings. It is a cultural achievement, patiently constructed over the course of centuries. The painting did not simply grow old. It was taught to remain the same.

It would be absurd to argue that museums should begin repainting their Caspar David Friedrichs. The nineteenth century did not invent conservation without reason. We have gained an extraordinary respect for the historical object, for the fragile surface that has survived wars, revolutions, neglect, and time itself. To stand before a painting and know that the light falling upon it is reflected from pigment laid down hundreds of years ago is one of the quiet miracles museums make possible. Yet something was lost as well.

Europe once imagined that works of art could continue their lives after their makers had died. A painting, like a play, could acquire new meanings not only through changing audiences but through changing appearances. It could grow older without becoming fixed. It could remain contemporary by allowing itself to become different, or just be interpreted differently. That confidence has disappeared. Today, we ask paintings to endure rather than to evolve. We preserve them with extraordinary care, but we no longer expect them to participate in the present. They have become visitors from another time, protected precisely because they no longer belong to ours.

Anton Chekhov’s plays are always waiting for their next performance. Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings are waiting for nothing. That difference tells us less about theater and painting than about how we have learned to imagine the past itself. Yet this difference between theater and painting is stranger than it first appears.

The Cherry Orchard directed by Peter Stein — Schaubühne, 1989. Another major European interpretation. Stein's relationship to Chekhov was exceptionally serious and textually meticulous; his production premiered in 1989 and was reconstructed in 1991.

Why should plays be expected to change while paintings are expected never to do so? Why do we believe that one work of art remains alive only by continual reinterpretation, while another remains alive only by remaining exactly as it is? We tend to assume that these are natural differences between two artistic mediums. They are nothing of the sort. They are the result of a historical decision—one so complete that we have almost forgotten it was ever made.

If the theater possesses an original, no one has ever seen it. We know the words Chekhov wrote. We know, more or less, how his characters move through the four acts of The Cherry Orchard. We know where they enter, when they leave, and what they say to one another. Yet none of this tells us what the play “originally” looked like. Every performance fills the empty spaces differently. One production discovers comedy where another finds despair. One lingers over silence, while another hurries through it. A pause that lasts three seconds in London might last ten in Tokyo. The same line can be spoken with tenderness, irony, exhaustion, or contempt. None of these choices is accidental, yet none can claim to be final.

The remarkable thing is that audiences have never expected them to be. No one leaves the theater disappointed because the actors failed to reproduce the gestures of the original cast in Moscow in 1904. No critic complains that the lighting differs from that of the first production, or that the voices no longer resemble those Chekhov heard during rehearsals. Such objections would seem absurd. We understand instinctively that a play belongs not only to the moment in which it was written but also to every moment in which it is performed.

This continual transformation is not regarded as a weakness of the theater. It is its defining condition. A play that could no longer be interpreted would also cease to be performed. Each new production accepts, almost without thinking, that the work has survived precisely because it remains open to alteration. Fidelity does not reside in imitation but in returning, again and again, to something that can never be exhausted.

Caspar David Friedrich, Abbey in the Oakwood (Abtei im Eichwald), 1809–10. Oil on canvas, 110.4 × 171 cm

Theater, in other words, has always distinguished the work itself from any single realization of it. A performance may succeed brilliantly or fail completely, but neither outcome alters the identity of the play. Tomorrow another company will begin again. The work remains unfinished not because Chekhov left it incomplete, but because performance itself is an art of perpetual renewal. For painting, we have come to believe the opposite.

Catherine Davis (born in 1971 in Aberdeen, Scotland) is a historian of performance and historical thought at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her work explores the cultural histories of theater, museums, and historical consciousness. She has a long-standing interest in ideas that become so familiar they cease to appear historical. She lives somewhere between the theater and the museum, convinced that the two have been arguing about time for far longer than either realizes.

Cover image: Cherry Orchard directed by Peter Brook — Bouffes du Nord, Paris, 1981. La Cerisaie, with Natasha Parry, Michel Piccoli and Niels Arestrup. Brook stripped away much of the conventional picturesque Russian atmosphere. The production later toured internationally and returned at BAM in 1988.