The right eyes: Rilke on painting

Rilke on painting

Main navigation

Elena Maslova-Levin

How great this watching of his was, and how unimpeachably accurate

by

And how great this watching of his was, and how unimpeachably accurate, is almost touchingly confirmed by the fact that, without even remotely interpreting his expression or presuming himself superior to it, he reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter-of-fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 23, 1907

I wondered last night whether my attempt to give you an impression of the woman in the red armchair was at all successful.

I’m not sure that I even managed to describe the balance of its tonal values; words seemed more inadequate than ever, indeed inappropriate; and yet it should be possible to make compelling use of them, if one could only look at such a picture as if it were part of nature—in which case it ought to be possible to express its existence somehow.

For a moment it seemed easier to talk about the self-portrait; apparently it’s an earlier work, it doesn’t reach all the way through the whole wide-open palette, it seems to keep to the middle range, between yellow-red, ocher, lacquer red, and violet purple.

In the jacket and hair it goes all the way to the bottom of a moist -violet brown contending against a wall of gray and pale copper. But looking closer, you discover the inner presence of light greens and juicy blues, which intensify the reddish tones and define the lighter areas more precisely.

Paul Cezanne. Self-portrait in front of pink background. 1875.

In this case, however, the object as such is more tangible, and the words, which feel so unhappy when made to denote purely painterly facts, are only too eager to return to themselves in the description of the man portrayed, for here’s where their proper domain begins.

His right profile is turned by a quarter in the direction of the viewer, looking.

The dense dark hair is bunched together at the back of the head and lies above the ears so that the whole contour of the skull is exposed; it is drawn with eminent assurance, hard and yet round, the brow sloping down and of one piece, its firmness prevailing even where, dissolved into form and surface, it is merely the outermost contour containing a thousand others.

The strong structure of this skull which seems hammered and sculpted from within is reinforced by the ridges of the eyebrows; but from there, pushed forward toward the bottom, shoed out, as it were, by the closely bearded chin, hangs the face, hangs as if every feature had been suspended individually, unbelievably intensified and yet reduced to utter primitivity, yielding that expression of uncontrolled amazement in which children and country people can lose themselves,—except that the gazeless stupor of their absorption has been replaced by an animal alertness which entertains an untiring, objective wakefulness in the unblinking eyes.

And how great this watching of his was, and how unimpeachably accurate, is almost touchingly confirmed by the fact that, without even remotely interpreting his expression or presuming himself superior to it, he reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter-of-fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.

Fare well … for now; perhaps you can see in all this a little of the old man, who deserves the epithet he applied to Pissarro: humble et colossal. Today is the anniversary of his death …

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: The work

Rilke draws an interesting triangle here, between Reality (or “facts”), Colors (painting), and Words (language). Colors and Words are alternative means of portraying Reality, but they are also, in themselves, parts of Reality.

In his description of the portrait of Mme Cézanne, he aimed to approach the painting as if it were part of nature (rather than a representation of something else). Here, he aims to describe not the painting as an independent part of reality, but rather the man represented in the painting, the reality behind the painting — and this is easier for words to do, for here’s where their proper domain begins.

But he is really describing both the painting and the reality reenacted in it, isn’t he?

SEEING PRACTICE: Cézanne

For Rilke, the reality portrayed in the painting seems much more tangible here than in the portrait of Mme Cézanne (I include it below again for the sake of comparison). And for him, this intangibility of the object being portrayed is a sign of Cézanne’s growth as an artist, of the turning point in the evolution of art.

Do you see what he means?

Paul Cezanne. Portrait of Madame Cezanne. 1878.

 

 

The whole picture finally keeps reality in equilibrium

by

… that’s how each daub plays its part in maintaining equilibrium and in producing it: just as the whole picture finally keeps reality in equilibrium.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

In the first part of this letter, Rilke describes this painting: how it looks.

Now, he writes about its inner essence: how it works.

 

OCTOBER 22, 1907 (Part 2)

Paul Cezanne. Portrait of Madame Cezanne. 1878. Click the image to zoom in (on Google Cultural Institute).

It’s as if every part were aware of all the others—it participates that much; that much adjustment and rejection is happening in it; that’s how each daub plays its part in maintaining equilibrium and in producing it: just as the whole picture finally keeps reality in equilibrium.

For if one says, this is a red armchair (and it is the first and ultimate red armchair in the history of painting): it is that only because it contains latently within itself an experienced sum of color which, whatever it may be, reinforces and confirms it in this red.

To reach the peak of its expression, it is very strongly painted around the light human figure, so that a kind of waxy surface develops; and yet the color does not preponderate over the object, which seems so perfectly translated into its painterly equivalents that, while it is fully achieved and given as an object, its bourgeois reality at the same time relinquishes all its heaviness to a final and definitive picture-existence.

Everything, as I already wrote, has become an affair that’s settled among the colors themselves: a color will come into its own in response to another, or assert itself, or recollect itself.

Just as in the mouth of a dog various secretions will gather in anticipation at the approach of various things—consenting ones for drawing out nutrients, and correcting ones to neutralize poisons: in the same way, intensifications and dilutions take place in the core of every color, helping it to survive contact with others.

In addition to this glandular activity within the intensity of colors, reflections (whose presence in nature always surprised me so: to discover the evening glow of the water as a permanent coloration in the rough green of the Nenuphar’s covering-leaves—) play the greatest role: weaker local colors abandon themselves completely, contenting themselves with reflecting the dominant ones.

In this hither and back of mutual and manifold influence, the interior of the picture vibrates, rises and falls back into itself, and does not have a single unmoving part. Just this for today … You see how difficult it becomes when one tries to get very close to the facts …

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

SEEING PRACTICE: INTERCOURSE OF COLORS

Click the image to open it on Google Art Institute website,and  let Rilke’s reflections on its inner workings, on its mutual intercourse of colors, guide your viewing, as though you were standing together in front of the painting in the Salon…

My blood describes it within me, but the naming of it passes by

by

In my feeling, the consciousness of their presence has become a heightening which I can feel even in my sleep; my blood describes it within me, but the naming of it passes by somewhere outside and is not called in.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

The Salon is closing. This co-creative encounter between Rilke and Cézanne is almost over.

But we still have a week worth of letters ahead of us, to cleanse and enrich our sense of vision.

 

OCTOBER 22, 1907, Part 1

<…> the Salon is closing today. And already, as I’m leaving it, on the way home for the last time, I want to go back to look up a violet, a green, or certain blue tones which I believe I should have seen better, more unforgettably.

Already, even after standing with such unremitting attention in front of the great color scheme of the woman in the red armchair, it is becoming as irretrievable in my memory as a figure with very many digits.

And yet I memorized it, number by number. In my feeling, the consciousness of their presence has become a heightening which I can feel even in my sleep; my blood describes it within me, but the naming of it passes by somewhere outside and is not called in.

Did I write about it?

Paul Cezanne. Portrait of Madame Cezanne. 1878. Click the image to zoom in (on Google Cultural Institute).

A red, upholstered low armchair has been placed in front of an earthy-green wall in which a cobalt-blue pattern (a cross with the center left out) is very sparingly repeated; the round bulging back curves and slopes forward and down to the armrests (which are sewn up like the sleeve-stump of an armless man).

The left armrest and the tassel that hangs from it full of vermilion no longer have the wall behind them but instead, near the lower edge, a broad stripe of greenish blue, against which they clash in loud contradiction.

Seated in this red armchair, which is a personality in its own right, is a woman, her hands in the lap of a dress with broad vertical stripes that are very lightly indicated by small, loosely distributed flecks of green yellows and yellow greens, up to the edge of the blue-gray jacket, which is held together in front by a blue, greenly scintillating silk bow.

In the brightness of the face, the proximity of all these colors has been exploited for a simple modeling of form and features: even the brown of the hair roundly pinned up above the temples and the smooth brown in the eyes has to express itself against its surroundings.

Colors and words. Intercourse of colors

The painting Rilke describes is reproduced here, so we can appreciate, in awe and wonder, the precision with which he remembers it. It is fully alive and present in his memory.

I can barely believe he berates himself for not remembering it better, MORE UNFORGETTABLY.

SEEING PRACTICE: PRESENCE AND MEMORY

For me, this letter is a painful reminder of how little we remember of our life experiences, even the most intense and memorable of them.

Which means, basically, that we bring very little of ourselves, of our presence into the brief and fleeting moments of our short lives.

Just try to look at a painting, and then describe it, for yourself, without looking at it. Or, better still, describe your favorite painting without looking at it, and THEN compare your description with a reproduction.

Secretly listening in his eye’s interior

by

… he (van Gogh) wanted or knew or experienced this and that; that blue called for orange and green for red: that, secretly listening in his eye’s interior, he had heard such things spoken, the inquisitive one.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Rilke continues his thoughts on the conflict between artistic insight and the artist’s conscious awareness of it, their ability to put their insights into words (here is the first part of the letter). The “writing painter” he mentions here is Émile Bernard.

OCTOBER 21, 1907 (Part 2)

Vincent Van Gogh. The Langlois bridge at Arles with women washing. 1888.

That van Gogh’s letters are so readable, that they are so rich, basically argues against him, just as it argues against a painter (holding up Cézanne for comparison) that he wanted or knew or experienced this and that; that blue called for orange and green for red: that, secretly listening in his eye’s interior, he had heard such things spoken, the inquisitive one.

And so he painted pictures on the strength of a single contradiction, thinking, additionally, of the Japanese simplification of color, which sets a plane on the next higher or next lower tone, summed up under an aggregate value; leading, in turn, to the drawn and explicit (i.e., invented) contour of the Japanese as a frame for the coordinated planes; leading, in other words, to a great deal of intentionality and arbitrariness—in short, to decoration.

Vincent Van Gogh. Self-portrait with felt hat. C. 1887. Click to zoom in (on van Gogh’s museum site).

Cézanne, too, was provoked by the letters of a writing painter—who, accordingly, wasn’t really a painter—to express himself on matters of painting; but when you see the few letters the old man wrote: how awkward this effort at self-explication remains, and how extremely repugnant it was to him.

He was almost incapable of saying anything.

The sentences in which he made the attempt become long and convoluted, they balk and bristle, get knotted up, and finally he drops them, beside himself with rage.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Paul Cezanne. Self-portrait. 1875.

THE WORK

The idea that a painter shouldn’t be able to express their insights in words would rob many a great painter of the title. Cézanne, by the way, would be one of them (his letters to Bernard, the only ones Rilke read, represent only a fraction of his writing).

This is one of Rilke’s ideas I find really hard to swallow (I wrote more about it here.)

On a more personal note:

I know, of course I know, that my resistance to this idea is not about defending van Gogh at all (who absolutely doesn’t need my defense).

It is my own self I am defending, my own identity, being as I obviously am a “writing painter”, and so perhaps not really a painter.

But when all is said and done, each of us has to follow the path of one’s own unique expression, towards and beyond one’s “custom-made” risks and dangers. In the end, all of them have to be faced and transcended for something new and meaningful to emerge.

Thus Rilke shows me the trail of the law of my own growth, at the time when this help across time and space is most needed and welcome.

 

SEEING PRACTICE: VAN GOGH’s indescribable reality

There are two self-portraits in this post, Cézanne’s and van Gogh’s, for you to compare.

This is one of van Gogh’s self-portraits that may lead the spectator to the idea of “intentionality and arbitrariness”, so unprecedented and unusual is the mutual intercourse of colors here.

Vincent van Gogh. Self-portrait with grey felt hat. 1887. Click to zoom in (on Van Gogh Museum site).

But what if we take a leap of faith and see it AS IS, trusting van Gogh to show us HIS indescribable reality, not an arbitrary stylistic invention?

Painting is something that takes place among the colors

by

OCTOBER 21, 1907 (Part 1)

… There’s something else I wanted to say about Cézanne: that no one before him ever demonstrated so clearly the extent to which painting is something that takes place among the colors, and how one has to leave them completely alone, so that they can come to terms among themselves.

Their mutual intercourse: this is the whole of painting.

Paul Cezanne. L’Estaque with red roofs. 1885.

Whoever meddles, whoever arranges, whoever injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity.

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition.

Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

The work. Art and consciousness

Ideally, an artist should not meddle in their own work…

A radical idea,  to which Rilke returns to time and again. More radical then than it is now, after more than a century of inquiries into the nature and inner workings of human mind.

It is an act of acceptance of the conscious mind’s ultimate inability to understand (let alone control) what’s going on in (and emerges through) the body, and the deep ocean of the unconscious.

Perhaps paradoxically, there might be more truth to it for a poet than for a painter.

The poet’s medium, language, is something they deeply and unconsciously KNOW from early childhood. The painter’s medium has to be mastered consciously and deliberately.

On the other hand, it is much easier for the language, this medium of talkative, narrative mind, to interfere with the stream of poetry than it is with painting, which exists as it were on another plane.

Seeing practice: Mutual intercourse of colors

There is an area of intense color contrast in this still life, an area where red and green clash and almost quarrel with one another. Click the image to zoom in on this area, just where fruits are seen against the bottle.

Paul Cezanne. Fruit and jug on a table. C. 1894.

Do you see how different this contrast seems when it appears in the context of the whole picture plane?

To feel beyond into the roots and into the earth itself

by

One even has to be poor for those who preceded one, otherwise one only reaches back to the time of their rise, of their first brilliance. But one has to feel beyond them into the roots and into the earth itself. One has to be able at every moment to place one’s hand on the earth like the first human being.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

This is one letter I decided to leave without pictures: just Rilke’s words in the sheer power of their purity.

He doesn’t mention any pictures himself, and adding my own visual associations would, as you will see, go completely against the spirit of this letter.

October 20, 1907

<…> I took my Sunday walk to the Salon again; through the quiet Faubourg Saint-Germain, past the palaces, above whose high front gates the old, great names are sometimes still visible: Hôtel de Castries, Hôtel d’Aravay, and over one of them: Hôtel Orloff, belonging to the rich family who rose to superabundance and princely estate with the help of the great Catherine; it produced brilliant chevaliers and also beautiful women whose smiles endowed their lineage with a past, Princesses Orloff, admired by all of Paris.

You know: there’s the highly arched gateway in the front building, massive and heavy, windows on the right and left which are so uninterested in looking outside that they turn their backs on the street; only the concierge’s window is clear and attentive in front of its modestly parted curtains. But as soon as one of the weighty wings of the gate opens, refulgent in its smooth dark green, the gaze can no longer be restrained.

Beyond the semidarkness of the gateway, the palace steps back as if to show itself (the way someone might show off a new dress), far away from the street.

Its middle door, which is all of glass, tosses a few stairs down toward the gravel of the untouched courtyard, and standing behind all the windows, which are scarcely smaller than the door, are curtains, as if in beautiful dresses. Where they are missing, one can see the ribbon of the staircase being gently led up in tranquil ascent.

And one senses the coolness of a vestibule, with cold walls that are reserved and unparticipating, like servants at the table, and whose only purpose is to pass the candelabras around in the evening.

One senses, too, and believes, that these palaces have royal rooms in the interior, there is something in one’s blood that belongs in there, and for a second the whole gamut of emotions rests between the heaviness of bronze-encased ancient Chinese porcelain and the lightness of a chime’s voice:

—but one goes to the picture gallery, where none of this means anything, at least not the way it stands there in the rue Saint-Dominique, nor the way it can be in a little bit of blood that occasionally runs through one’s heart with a scent like that of an old perfume.

But all this will have to be shed, dismissed, put away.

Even someone who had such palaces to utter would have to approach them innocently and in poverty, and not as someone who could still be seduced by them.

Surely one has to take one’s impartiality to the point where one rejects the interpretive bias even of vague emotional memories, prejudices, and predilections transmitted as part of one’s heritage, taking instead whatever strength, admiration, or desire emerges with them, and applying it, nameless and new, to one’s own tasks.

One has to be poor unto the tenth generation.

One even has to be poor for those who preceded one, otherwise one only reaches back to the time of their rise, of their first brilliance. But one has to feel beyond them into the roots and into the earth itself. One has to be able at every moment to place one’s hand on the earth like the first human being.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: POVERTY

Rilke returns to the storyline of poverty. Not so much material poverty, but rather letting go all cultural associations, emotional memories, heritage, identity.

All this, however precious and cherished, has to be shed if one is to cleanse the doors of perception.

SEEING PRACTICE: POVERTY

As we look at the world around us, we usually don’t notice the background stream of associations and memories unless something really stirs us, just as we don’t usually hear the sound of our own heartbeat.

But the first step to being able to see the world “like the first human being” is to notice this stream of associations, yo pay attention to it.