The right eyes: Rilke on painting

Rilke on painting

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Elena Maslova-Levin

Blows and slashes of tree- and bush-green

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Another painting by van Gogh, but how different are its greens… one can hardly believe that we can use one word to name these colors.

OCTOBER 17, 1907 (Part 3)

A park or an alley in a town park in Arles, with black people on benches on the right and left, a blue newspaper reader in front and a violet woman in the back, beneath and among blows and slashes of tree- and bush-green.

Vincent Van Gogh. Entrance to the public garden in Arles. 1888

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: COLORS AND WORDS

Yesterday, we looked at a green that was deep and utterly shallow in artificial wakefulness. Today, it is tree- and bush-green in full sunlight.

SEEING PRACTICE: COLOR GREEN

Compare the greens of the park with the greens of the night cafe. What is it that makes them so radically different?

Vincent Van Gogh. The Night Cafe. 1888.

Deep and utterly shallow green

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… artificial wakefulness in wine red, lamp yellow, deep and utterly shallow green…

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Rilke goes to Bernheim’s gallery to see Rodin’s drawings, but there he encounters van Gogh again.

There is only a couple of sentences in today’s segment, and the painting Rilke talks about. I didn’t want to dilute the sheer power of synergy between this painting and the words.

 

OCTOBER 17, 1907 (PART 2)

First Mr. Bernheim took me to his storage room and showed me: van Goghs. The night café I already wrote about;

Vincent Van Gogh. The Night Cafe. 1888.

but a lot more could be said about its artificial wakefulness in wine red, lamp yellow, deep and utterly shallow green, with three mirrors, each of which contains a different emptiness.

STORYLINE: COLORS AND WORDS

How can something be both deep and utterly shallow? 

And yet, this paradoxical phrase captures the quality of this painting’s green with perfect precision.

SEEING PRACTICE: COLOR

There is striking, painful, naked simplicity in this color composition. But for all its simplicity, I think no one but van Gogh could have pulled this off.

I don’t want to influence your perception here, but if you are interested in my take on it, you can read it here (preferably after you’ve spent some time with the painting on your own).

…the generosity of a born landscape

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And all this lies out there with the generosity of a born landscape, and casts forth space.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

October 17, 1907 (Part 1)

<….> But the morning was bright.

A broad east wind invading us with a developed front, because he finds the city so spacious.

On the opposite side, westerly, blown, pushed out, cloud archipelagos, island groups, gray like the neck and chest feathers of aquatic birds in an ocean of cold, too remotely blissful barely-blue.

Paul Cezanne. Ile de France Landscape. 1880.

And underneath all this, low, there’s still the Place de la Concorde and the trees of the Champs-Éysées, shady, a black simplified to green, beneath the western clouds. Toward the right there are houses, bright, windblown, and sunny, and far off in the background in a blue dove-gray, houses again, drawn together in planes, a serried row of straight-edged quarrylike surfaces.

Pau Cezanne. Bibemus quarry. 1898.

And suddenly, as one approaches the obelisk (around whose granite there is always a glimmering of blond old warmth and in whose hieroglyphic hollows, especially in the repeatedly recurring owl, an ancient Egyptian shadow-blue is preserved, dried up as if in the wells of a paint box), the wonderful Avenue comes flowing toward you in a scarcely perceptible downward slope, fast and rich and like a river which with the force of its own violence, ages ago, drilled a passageway through the sheer cliff of the Arc de Triomphe back there by the Étoile.

Paul Cezanne. House with red roof. 1890.

And all this lies out there with the generosity of a born landscape, and casts forth space.

And from the roofs, there and there, the flags keep rising into the high air, stretching, flapping as if to take flight: there and there.

That’s what my walk to the Rodin drawings was like today.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

 STORYLINE: LANDSCAPE OF WORDS

As a painter, I know how to make landscapes out of paint. It is my craft.

But Rilke’s landscapes made of words are pure, breathtaking magic. I SEE how his words arise from a synergy with Cézanne’s color planes — and I did my best to share my vision with you with the paintings included in this letter.

I do see, but cannot even remotely understand.

SEEING PRACTICE: BORN LANDSCAPE (INDESCRIBABLE REALITY)

Between Cézanne’s colors and Rilke’s words, the landscape itself — any landscape — anything that arises, be it in your vision or mine, turns into a work of art.

I sometimes pause to remember this: these “born landscapes” pass in front of our eyes every single moment, and each is utterly unique. There never has been, nor will ever be, this exact constellation of light, point of view, and the spectator’s unique sense of vision. This work of art arises with the generosity of a born landscape, and disappears to give birth to another one; most of them unnoticed, unseen.

These landscapes are gifts from Nature, and from countless generations of artists that shaped and expanded our sense of vision. All one has to do is RECEIVE these abundant gifts.

If it is good, one can’t live to see it recognized

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Basically, if it is good, one can’t live to see it recognized: otherwise it’s just half good and not reckless enough …

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

In the first part of this letter, Rilke observes visitors to the Salon, and their utter inability to see Cézanne’s work (even when it is already in the Salon, allowed and sanctified by the art world).

 

OCTOBER 16, 1907 (Part 2)

… One cannot expect that a time that is capable of gratifying aesthetic requirements of this order should be able to admire Cézanne and grasp anything of his devotion and hidden splendor.

The merchants make noise, that is all; and those who have a need to attach themselves to these things could be counted on the fingers of two hands, and they stand apart and are silent.

Edouard Manet. A bar at the Folies Bergere. 1882.

And someone told the old man in Aix that he was “famous.” He, however, knew better within himself and let the speaker continue.

Paul Cezanne. A boy in a red vest. 1890.

 

But standing in front of his work, one comes back to the thought that every recognition (with very rare, unmistakable exceptions) should make one mistrustful of one’s own work.

Vincent van Gogh. Sower with setting sun. 1888.

Basically, if it is good, one can’t live to see it recognized: otherwise it’s just half good and not reckless enough …

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

THE WORK. THE OLD AND THE NEW

… if it is good, one can’t live to see it recognized: otherwise it’s just half good and not reckless enough …

These words have been playing themselves in my head for many years now, as a counterbalance to our age’s pervasive belief that if the work is not recognized, it cannot be any good. This belief is built into the very foundation of what is called “art world”: quality in art is in effect equated with the art world’s recognition of it.

As though our age were somehow better at seeing than that of Cézanne, Monet, van Gogh, Rilke… But is it?

SEEING PRACTICE

Kandinsky believed that every work of art is eventually understood. For him, that meant a lot: that the spectator partakes in the same inner experience as the artist. In Kandinsky’s own words: the spectator souls vibrates in response to the work, playing as it were the motive embodied by it.

It is not the same as “recognition”: an art work can be “officially” recognized without being truly understood.

Nowadays, Cézanne, Monet, van Gogh are as “recognized” as it gets. Their exhibitions tend to be blockbusters, so much so that tickets often have to be secured well in advance. And the public certainly behaves more respectfully than those ladies and gentlemen Rilke witnessed in 1907.

But do we truly see the paintings, do we fully understand them? Is our age capable of grasping anything of Cézanne’s devotion and hidden splendor?

 

 

Touchingly tentative portraits of Madame Cézanne

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… they plant themselves for a moment, without looking, next to one of those touchingly tentative portraits of Madame Cézanne, so as to exploit the hideousness of this painting for a comparison which they believe is so favorable to themselves.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 16, 1907 (Part 1)

Human beings, how they play with everything.

How blindly they misuse what has never been looked at, never experienced, distract themselves by displacing all that has been immeasurably gathered together <…>

Paul Cezanne. Portrait of Madame Cezanne. 1985.

You have only to see the people going through the two rooms, say on a Sunday: amused, ironically irritated, annoyed, indignant. And when they finally arrive at some concluding remark, there they stand, these Monsieurs, in the middle of this world, affecting a note of pathetic despair, and you hear them saying: il n’y a absolument rien, rien, rien.

Paul Cezanne. Madame Cezanne with a yellow-armchair. 1890

And the women, how beautiful they appear to themselves as they pass by; they recall that just a little while ago they saw their reflections in the glass doors as they stepped in, with complete satisfaction, and now, with their mirror image in mind, they plant themselves for a moment, without looking, next to one of those touchingly tentative portraits of Madame Cézanne, so as to exploit the hideousness of this painting for a comparison which they believe is so favorable to themselves.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Paul Cezanne. Portrait of Madame Cezanne. 1890.

SOLITUDE

The further one goes along one’s own path, living the experience all the way to the end, the more solitary the journey.

This letter touches two aspects of the artist’s solitude.

One is obvious: the general public’s inability to see what has been shown, to hear what has been said, if it is too radically new, to far removed from their habituated experiences.

The other is hardly mentioned, but it is there nonetheless. It is invoked by Rilke’s mention of the portraits of Mme Cézanne.

SEEING PRACTICE: Portraits of Hortense Fiquet-Cézanne

Cézanne met his future wife, Hortense Fiquet (1850– 1922) in Paris in 1869 (he was thirty years old at the time). Their son, Paul, was born in 1872, but Cézanne had to keep the relationship secret for a long time for fear of being disowned by his father. They married (and Paul was legitimized) only in 1886.

Alex Danchev writes in a note to The Letters of Paul Cézanne:

It is widely believed that she and Cézanne did not have much in common, apart from their son, and that soon enough she came to mean rather little to him.

Against that prejudiced account should be set at least twenty-four portraits, painted over a period of twenty years, long after they had ceased to live together all the time.

Cézanne studied his wife more intently and more durably than he did anyone else, except perhaps himself, to extraordinary effect.

My own experience of these portraits has changed dramatically over time.

As a young girl, all I saw in them was radical objectification. They were painted, I thought, as though there were no interpersonal relationship there, as though he didn’t see a human being in her at all.

But it is not at all the kind of objectification usually meant in the context of gender relationships. He approaches and sees her in the same way he did his mountain, Mont Sainte-Victoire, and as Rilke has reportedly once remarked, “Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.”

While working on this project, I found a very early portrait of Hortense, which stands quite apart from the rest.

Paul Cezanne. Hortense breast-feeding Paul. 1872.

In Rilke’s words, this early portrait says: I love her. If the ladies in the Salon (or me as a young girl) saw this, we would probably have been more touched, more impressed.

But the mature ones only say: HERE SHE IS.

Let me quote from an earlier letter here again, because it is so relevant here:

They’d paint: I love this here; instead of painting: here it is.

In which case everyone must see for himself whether or not I loved it. This is not shown at all, and some would even insist that it has nothing to do with love.

The love is so thoroughly used up in the action of making that there is no residue. It may be that this using up of love in anonymous work, which produces such pure things, was never achieved as completely as in the work of this old man.

 

 

 

Invoking infinite stillness

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And what hands: Buddha hands that know how to sleep, that lie down smoothly after all has passed, with fingers adjoining, to rest for centuries at the edge of a lap, lying with the palms facing up, or else steeply raised at the wrist, invoking infinite stillness.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Rilke describes his visit to the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, to see Rodin’s drawings. Here is the first part of this description.

He mentions “the dancing girls of King Sisowath”, a troupe of Cambodian dancers who accompanied King Sisowath during his 1906 visit to France. Rodin attended their performance in the Pré-Catelan, Paris on  July 10, 1906, and then followed them to Marseilles (they left the country on July 20)

October 15, 1907 (Part 2)

Auguste Rodin. Cambodian Dancer. 1906.
Click the image for details and to zoom in (on Rodin Museum site)

There were about fifteen new sheets which I found scattered among the others, all from the time when Rodin followed the dancing girls of King Sisowath on their tour so as to be able to admire them longer and better. <…>

There they were, these small graceful dancers, like transformed gazelles; the two long, slender arms drawn through the shoulders, through the slenderly massive torso (with the full slenderness of Buddha images) as if made of a single piece, long hammered out in the workshop, down to the wrists, upon which the hands then assumed their poses, agile and independent, like actors on the stage.

Auguste Rodin. Cambodian Dancer. 1906. Click the image for more details and to zoom in (Rodin Museum site).

 

And what hands: Buddha hands that know how to sleep, that lie down smoothly after all has passed, with fingers adjoining, to rest for centuries at the edge of a lap, lying with the palms facing up, or else steeply raised at the wrist, invoking infinite stillness.

These hands in wakefulness: imagine.

These fingers spread, open, starlike, or curved in upon each other as in a rose of Jericho; these fingers delighted and happy or else frightened, displaying at the very end of the long arms: themselves dancing.

And the whole body is used to keep this outermost dancing balanced: in the air, in its own atmosphere, in the gold of an Eastern aura.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

 

There is more information on the impression they made on Rodin on the Rodin Museum site (click the images to zoom in and see more detailed descriptions and quotes from Rodin).

The work

This letter is a wonderful illustrations of ever-present fluid mutual influences between art forms and cultures. The ancient culture of movement, translated into drawings by Rodin, and then both of them re-enacted in Rilke’s words.

SEEING PRACTICE: RODIN

The most remarkable aspect of these drawings is Rodin’s ability to drop all details to re-enact movements of the dancers. He said to Georges Bourdon (in an article for the newspaper Le Figaro on August 1, 1906):

… if they are beautiful, it is because they have a natural way of producing the right movements…

Do you see how the minimalistic simplicity of these drawings allows Rodin to represent a movement? Can you feel this movement inside your own body?