If only Caspar David Friedrich could have seen our Texas moon last night. It wasn’t quite full, but it was a bossy-bold moon, so bossy, in fact, that it would have inspired Friedrich to rethink his already revolutionary style of painting.

Oh, those Friedrich paintings—the ultra-depictions of German Romanticism! Those radically introspective landscapes, framed by the backs of people who, like us, turn to view the interior of the painting. Imagine, an artist strange enough to paint people from the back!

Not to mention everything else he did, like blending images of life (vines) and death (crumbling churches). And letting the candlelight in the window illuminate a snow-covered cemetery. All painted just in time for the onslaught of psychological interpretations that dominated the arts by the end of the 19th century.

I’m pretty sure the Texas moon lacks sufficient psychological ambiguity to make it into a Friedrich painting. It’s too proud and strong for Romanticism. Our July full moon is due to hit its peak tomorrow, Friday, at 1:40 a.m. According to the wonderful website Star Date, this full moon will be 240,000 miles away from earth. I wonder what Friedrich would say about this kind of exact data? Would the moon have seemed less intriguing if he knew the high-tech astronomical facts?

Two events changed my view of the moon. The more recent was a family trip in 2004 to McDonald Observatory, where we and our kids frolicked at a “Star Party.” McDonald Observatory sits in the middle of the rugged Davis Mountains. Once at the observatory, you can engage in a lot of activities, but none so impressive as gazing through their professional telescopes.

My experience with amateur telescopes hadn’t prepared me for this: my jaw dropped. The half-moon that night was close enough to reach out and pluck. Details were almost blinding. Even the shadowed half astonished me with its detail.

What would Friedrich say? This painter who is considered Beethoven’s favorite artist, and whose paintings are placed on Dover Editions of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas? Did he know much about the moon’s surface?

Which leads me to the second life-changing “moon” experience: an exhibit of paintings in 2001 called “Moonwatchers” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The interior rooms held the expected, stunning collection of Friedrich’s moon paintings, assembled from many galleries, plus moon paintings of some of his contemporaries. But the anterior rooms held the key to the exhibit: a sampling of the newest item hot off the presses during Friedrich’s day: Moon Atlases.

Yes moon atlases. They were trendy, expensive, and they documented what was on everyone’s tongue: the details of topography discovered by scientists in the late 18th and early 19th century.

I was transfixed by these graphically beautiful, physically heavy, elaborately bound atlases. A key tenet in my artistic understanding was welded into place at that instant: art is never unrelated to contemporary culture, including science!

I already knew that, of course. Goodness, I’d stated this in countless essay questions in undergraduate and graduate courses. But knowing something academically, and feeling down to the core of one’s bones, these are different! Observations about the interrelationship of art with culture, history, geography, and science made over long years of university teaching became, from that point on, stair-steps in a mission.

Gaze up tonight at the moon. Art is related to everything. And that’s why it must stand only a moonbeam away from the center of our children’s education.