Elena Maslova-Levin

Apples indestructible in their stubborn thereness

November 17, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

In Cézanne they cease to be edible altogether, that’s how thing-like and real they become, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Earlier in this letter, Rilke wrote about the evolution of the colour blue in painting, and Chardin as the intermediary on the path from the eighteenth-century blue to Cézanne’s blue.

Here, he traces a fundamentally similar development in the way objects are treated in painting.

OCTOBER 8, 1907 (Part 3)

… Chardin was the intermediary in other respects, too; his fruits are no longer thinking of a gala dinner, they’re scattered about on kitchen tables and don’t care whether they are eaten beautifully or not.

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin. The Silver Goblet. 1728.

In Cézanne they cease to be edible altogether, that’s how thing-like and real they become, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

POVERTY

In this letter, the theme of poverty may not be obvious (elsewhere, Rilke writes that Cézanne’s apples are all “cooking apples”; that is, a poor man’s apples). Here, it is not about poverty in the narrow, literal sense, but about the lack of pretenses, cultural symbolisms, refinements — these hallmarks of civilized, wealthy society.

Cézanne’s apples are simply things, seen and painted as they are, without any human meanings attached or implied (including being edible).

Paul Cezanne. Still life with apples and pears. 1887

SEEING PRACTICE: SIMPLY THINGS (APPLES)

We go through life projecting meanings and emotions onto things, and not even noticing that we do it most of the time. These projections shape our reality, which essentially means that they prevent us from SEEING reality.

Just notice how hard it can be to see an apple as it is, in its plain, objective thereness, without attaching any words and sensations to it, so that it is not tasty, or fresh, or healthy, or beautiful, or anything like this at all. It is neither a sign of autumn harvest, nor the symbol of the fall of man. It simply is.

It is in this plain THERENESS that Rilke feels affinity with Cézanne.

A monograph on the color blue

November 16, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

I could imagine someone writing a monograph on the color blue, from the dense waxy blue of the Pompeiian wall paintings to Chardin and further to Cézanne: what a biography!

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

We are still in the Louvre, with Rilke tracing the origins of Cézanne’s color.

OCTOBER 8, 1907 (PART 2)

Contemporaneously with Guardi and Tiepolo, a woman too was painting, a Venetian, who came to all the courts and whose name was among the most well known of her time: Rosalba Carriera.

<…>

Three portraits are in the Louvre. A young lady, her face raised up by the straight neck and then turned naively toward the viewer, and in front of her décolleté lace dress she holds a small clear-eyed capuchin monkey who is peering out from the lower edge of the half-length portrait as eagerly as she’s looking out on top, just a bit more indifferently.

He’s reaching out with one small perfidious black hand to draw her tender, distracted hand into the picture by one slender finger.

Rosalba Carriera. Young girl holding a monkey. 1721.

This is so full of one period that it is valid for all times. And it is lovely and lightly painted, but really painted. There’s also a blue cloak in the picture and one whole lilac-white gillyflower stem, which, strangely, takes the place of a breast ornament.

And I noticed that this blue is that special eighteenth-century blue that you can find everywhere, in La Tour,

Maurice Quentin de La Tour. Portrait of King Louis XV. 1748.

in Peronnet,

and which even in Chardin does not cease to be elegant, even though here, as the ribbon of his peculiar hood (in the self-portrait with the horn-rimmed pince-nez), it is used quite recklessly.

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin. Self-Portrait with Spectacles. 1771.

(I could imagine someone writing a monograph on the color blue, from the dense waxy blue of the Pompeiian wall paintings to Chardin and further to Cézanne: what a biography!)

For Cézanne’s very unique blue is descended from these, it comes from the eighteenth-century blue which Chardin stripped of its pretension and which now, in Cézanne, no longer carries any secondary significance.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

MONOGRAPH on THE COLOR BLUE

Heinrich Wiegand Petzet writes in his introduction to “Letters on Cézanne”:

In one of the letters, he speaks of the possibility of writing a monograph on the color blue, beginning with the pastels of Rosalba Carriera and the special blue of the eighteenth century, whereupon he mentions Cézanne’s “very unique blue.” In the course of the letters he produces a series of variations of this blue, formulations whose expressive power exceeds everything that has ever been said about this color.

Here are some of these formulations:

completely supportless blue
cold, too remotely blissful barely-blue
blue dove-gray
an ancient Egyptian shadow-blue
self-contained blue
listening blue
thunderstorm blue
bourgeois cotton blue
densely quilted blue, and finally:
full of revolt Blue, Blue, Blue.

He is writing this monograph on the color blue, in these very letters.

Isn’t it strange how one’s best work sometimes happens not as “work”, but just so, as the unfolding of life, without pretension?

Gradually stripping everything of pretension: the color blue, the apples, the work: this is the deepest motive of these letters. For Rilke, this is also the quintessence of the evolution of art, be it poetry or painting.

SEEING PRACTICE: THE COLOR BLUE

A lot of color nuances disappear in reproductions, but it is still possible to get a glimpse of the evolution of blue Rilke writes about.

But is it just the evolution of painting, or the evolution of our sense of vision?

Or of the color blue itself?

After all, color as we know it doesn’t exist without vision; it is a product of the brain.

The magic of painting is in its ability to create a space where the brain shakes off some of its habituated routines, and is able to perceive color differently, more richly, more intensely than in “real life”. And some of this can then spill over into our “normal” vision — that’s how art expands and cleanses our visual perception.

As you go through your day, notice the color blue as you see it in nature. Has you perception shifted in response to the paintings you have just seen?

Every insight has its parvenus

November 15, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

… you notice two things right away: that every insight has its parvenus, upstarts who make a hue and cry as soon as they catch on,—and then, that perhaps it’s not so much a question of insights, which bring up too much consciousness.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

We often hear nowadays that all one needs to do to unleash one’s creativity is to go deep inside oneself. It is there, and only there, that our unique insights are to be revealed.

But this is not enough. If the artist’s vision, and their consciousness, are not informed, refined, expanded by the art of the past, then we are bound to re-invent wheels, and blindly believe our naive inventions to be new and unique.

Cézanne’s was a magnificent achievement, but it is deeply grounded in the work of his predecessors; just like no peak can exist without a mountain.

So Rilke goes to the Louvre.

He keeps dancing between the past and the present, discovering the past in the present (and vice versa).

OCTOBER 8, 2017 (PART 1)

It’s strange to walk through the Louvre after two days in the Salon d’Automne: you notice two things right away: that every insight has its parvenus, upstarts who make a hue and cry as soon as they catch on,—and then, that perhaps it’s not so much a question of insights, which bring up too much consciousness.

As if these masters in the Louvre didn’t know that painting is made up of color. I’ve looked at the Venetians: they’re of an indescribably radical colorfulness; you can feel how far it goes in Tintoretto.

Tintoretto. The coronation of the virgin. C. 1580. Click to see on the Louvre’s website.

Almost further than with Titian.

Titian. The Pastoral Concert. C. 1509. Click to see on the Louvre’s website.

And so on into the eighteenth century, where the only thing separating their color scale from Manet’s is the use of black.

Guardi has it, incidentally; it was unavoidable, right there in the middle of all that brightness, ever since the laws against extravagant display decreed the use of black gondolas.

Francesco Guardi. The Rialto Bridge with the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi. 1763.

But he still uses it more as a dark mirror than as a color; Manet was the first—encouraged by the Japanese, certainly—to give it equal value among the other colors.

Edouard Manet. Berthe Morisot with a Fan. 1872.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

INTERCOURSE of Colors

For Rilke, Cézanne’s major achievement is in color — in recreating reality in colors, in their mutual intercourse. Not every artist would agree with that, but I do.

So it is the pre-history of this achievement that he is looking for and seeing in the Louvre: opening the palette to pure primary colors, and including black as a color (rather than simply the absence of color, “the dark mirror” which absorbs all light).

SEEING PRACTICE: the COLOR BLACK

The difference between black as absence of color, as pure darkness, versus black as an equal among colors is rooted deeply in the biology of human vision.

The human eye has different photoreceptors for these two visual perceptions.

“Rods” are responsible for detecting the amount of light; for them, “black” means darkness. They are concentrated on the periphery of retina, and we use them mainly when there isn’t enough light to detect color differences.

“Cons” are concentrated in the centre of the retina, and they are responsible for color recognition. There are three types of cons, “red”, “blue” and “green”; for them, “black” means a certain combination of these signals, just like any other color.

To notice the difference between the two perceptions of black in real life, you can either squint (to decrease the amount of light perceived by the eye) or turn your head to use your peripheral vision.

All of reality is on his side

November 14, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

Here, all of reality is on his side: in this dense quilted blue of his, in his red, and his shadowless green, and the reddish black of his wine bottles.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Finally, Cézanne. After the long detour of yesterday’s letter, Rilke faces this new reality head-on, without further delays.

He says so much in a single sentence that I had to add four paintings to re-create it in images. These might not be the exact same paintings he saw on that day, but he isn’t really writing about individual paintings, but rather about all of them simultaneously.

OCTOBER 7, 1907

You know how much more remarkable I always find the people walking about in front of paintings than the paintings themselves. It’s no different in this Salon d’Automne, except for the Cézanne room.

Here, all of reality is on his side: in this dense quilted blue of his,

Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir. 1904-1906. Click to zoom in (on Google Cultural Institute site)

in his red

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

and his shadowless green

Paul Cezanne. View of L’Estaque and Chateaux-d’If. 1885.

and the reddish black of his wine bottles.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with soup tureen. 1884.

And the humbleness of all his objects: the apples are all cooking apples and the wine bottles belong in the roundly bulging pockets of an old coat.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: COLORs and WORDS

How can one make landscapes and things out of WORDS as Cézanne made them out of colors?

This challenge is implicitly always there in the letters, and one way Rilke faces it is through finding new ways of naming the colors themselves.

This letter is a tentative beginning of what would blossom into color-filled prose by the end of the month.

SEEING PRACTICE: COLOR BLUE

I have chosen one painting for each color mentioned in Rilke’s letter, but my choice may be arbitrary and subjective. ALL Cézanne’s colors are there in every painting, but in very different versions of themselves.

I wonder what Rilke really meant, and Clara Rilke saw in her mind’s eye when she read this phrase, “this dense quilted blue of his“. There are many different blues even in the paintings included here.

What came up in my mind’s eye was this very specific kind of blue, the blue of the sky above Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir (1904-1906), spilling into the folds of this painting’s mountain, and into the shadows of its greenery.

Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir. 1904-1906.

But I wonder, can this phrase also point to ALL of Cézanne’s blues, to something they all share?

For us, Cézanne is valid and moving and important

November 13, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

Cézanne is no longer possible for the old lady; but for us he is valid and moving and important.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Rilke’s first visit to the Salon d’Automne, to Cézanne’s retrospective exhibition which is at the heart of the boo (Cézanne had died in 1906). A strange letter, suspended as it is between two alternative realities, the fictional no less real than the real.

Cézanne is not mentioned till the very last sentence, as though Rilke didn’t yet know how to approach him with words, and so invented a longer, round-about, path between the past and the future, lingering in the past.

OCTOBER 6, 1907

The old closed-down hotels in the Faubourg Saint-Germain with their white-gray shutters, their discreet gardens and courtyards, the locked ironwork gates and heavy, tight-shutting doors.

Some of them were very haughty and sophisticated and inaccessible. These may have been the Talleyrands, the de la Rochefoucaulds, unapproachable gentry.

But then came a street that was just as quiet with somewhat smaller houses, no less noble in their manner and quite reserved.

One of the gates was just about to close; a servant in his morning livery turned around again and looked at me carefully and thoughtfully. And at that same moment it seemed to me that it would have taken only a very slight shift in the pattern of things at some time in order for him to recognize me and step back and hold open the door.

In order for an old lady to be up there, a grand-mère who would make it possible to receive her favorite grandson even at this early hour.

Edouard Manet. Interior at Arcachon. 1871

Now it is hard to believe that this was the way that led to the Salon d’Automne. But finally I did arrive at the bright and colorful picture market, which, for all its straining to make an impression, did not dispel my inner mood.

The old lady persisted, and I felt how much it would be beneath her dignity to come and look at these pictures.

I wondered whether I might not find something I could tell her about after all, and found a room with pictures by Berthe Morisot (Manet’s sister-in-law)

Berthe Morisot. Young-woman on a couch. 1885

and a wall with works by Eva Gonzales (Manet’s student).

Cézanne is no longer possible for the old lady; but for us he is valid and moving and important.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

The OLD and THE NEW

The old lady that Rilke conjures up in this letter resonates so strikingly with this painting by Edouard Manet, but it is never mentioned in the letter: both Manet and Cézanne, with their radical, world-overthrowing newness, are touched only obliquely here.

Rilke is not that old lady, but the old lady is Rilke. Where else could she have appeared from?

Isn’t it the past within him, the past in Cézanne is not yet possible, and which longs still for something calmer, something less radical?

SEEING PRACTICE: Cézanne indescribable reality

Paul Cézanne. Trees and Rocks, Near the Château Noir. 1900-1906. Click to zoom in (on Google Art Project site).

It may be hard for us now, in the twenty first century, to recognize Cézanne’s radical newness. The expansion of vision he expressed in painting has been integrated, to a degree at least, into our own sense of vision.

Can a modern viewer experience the original puzzlement and resistance Cézanne’s contemporaries, including Rilke, must have felt in front of his paintings? Well, we can try — if only to appreciate afresh how different our sense of vision now is.

For this seeing practice, I chose a painting which, I believe, makes it easier. Click through to zoom in and see how hard it must have been to reconcile this way of seeing with more conventional representations of visual reality.

Devotion to what is nearest

November 12, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

But this devotion to what is nearest, this is something I can’t do as yet, or only in my best moments, while it is at one’s worst moments that one really needs it.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 4, 1907

… one is still so far away from being able to work at all times.

Van Gogh could perhaps lose his composure, but behind it there was always his work, he could no longer lose that. And Rodin, when he’s not feeling well, is very close to his work, writes beautiful things on countless pieces of paper, reads Plato and follows him in his thought.

But I have a feeling that this is not just the result of discipline or compulsion (otherwise it would be tiring, the way I’ve been tired from working in recent weeks); it is all joy; it is natural well-being in the one thing that surpasses everything else.

Perhaps one has to have a clearer insight into the nature of one’s “task,” get a more tangible hold on it, recognize it in a hundred details. I believe I do feel what van Gogh must have felt at a certain juncture, and it is a strong and great feeling: that everything is yet to be done: everything.

But this devotion to what is nearest, this is something I can’t do as yet, or only in my best moments, while it is at one’s worst moments that one really needs it. Van Gogh could paint an Intérieur d’hôpital, and on his most fearful days he painted the most fearful objects.

Vincent Van Gogh. Ward at the hospital in Arles. 1889.

How else could he have survived.

This is what must be attained, and I have a definite sense that it can’t be forced. It must come out of insight, from pleasure, from no longer being able to postpone the work in view of all there is to be done.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

THE WORK

Is it possible to “work at all times”? Science tells us that it is not (but then, its findings change so dizzyingly rapidly nowadays…)

For Rilke, staying “within the work” all the time is unequivocally a prerequisite for any real achievement. This is the lesson he reads in the lives of Rodin, van Gogh, and then, later on, Cézanne… He looks at them, and finds himself lacking.

But in the course of these letters, one sees how his work unfolds when he as it were is not looking, effortlessly.

This book itself, undoubtedly one of his major achievements, is being written while he is trying to force himself to do something else (and even, at some later point, resolving that he must never write about Cézanne at all…).

SEEING PRACTICE: FEARFUL OBJECTS

Rilke writes: “… on his most fearful days he (van Gogh) painted the most fearful objects — how else could he have survived”. Here is another example, a drawing from the asylum van Gogh stayed in after his breakdown.

Vincent van Gogh. Vestibule in the Asylum. 1889. Click to zoom in (on van Gogh museum website).

We now know it must have been one of the bad, most fearful days, because when van Gogh felt up to it, he ventured to paint outside. And he is drawing the most fearful things: the walls he imprisoned himself in, the door which only seems open, because he cannot cross the threshold.

Can we, too, look at our fears with this courage, with this kind of attention?