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A great splendor from within

November 11, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

But in his paintings (the arbre fleuri) poverty has already become rich: a great splendor from within.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

In this letter, Rilke is still under the impression of Van Gogh’s reproductions. He writes:

Would that you were sitting with me in front of the van Gogh portfolio (which I am returning with a heavy heart). It has done me so much good these two days: it was the right moment.

Isn’t that what we are doing here, trying to be with him in front of these paintings?

But this letter is as much about van Gogh’s life as it is about his paintings. Rilke recounts his biography — from his work in an art gallery, to service as an evangelical pastor, and then to being a painter, and then to madness. This is where the part of the letter included below begins…

OCTOBER 3, 1907

What a biography. Is it really true that everyone is now acting as if they understood this and the pictures that came out of it?

Shouldn’t art dealers and also art critics be really more perplexed about or else more indifferent to this dear zealot, in whom something of the spirit of Saint Francis was coming back to life?

I am surprised by his quick rise to fame. Ah, how he, too, renounced and renounced.

His self-portrait in the portfolio looks needy and tormented, almost desperate, but not devastated: the way a dog looks when it’s in a bad way. He holds out his face and you take note of the fact: he’s in a bad way, day and night.

But in his paintings (the arbre fleuri) poverty has already become rich: a great splendor from within.

Vincent Van Gogh. Peach trees in blossom. 1886.

And that’s how he sees everything: as a poor man; just compare his parks.

These too are expressed with such quietness and simplicity, as if for poor people, so they can understand; without going into the extravagance that’s in these trees; as if to do that would already be taking sides.

Vincent Van Gogh. Park at Asniers in spring. 1887.

He isn’t on anyone’s side, isn’t on the side of the parks, and his love for all these things is directed at the nameless, and that’s why he himself concealed it. He does not show it, he has it.

And quickly takes it out of himself and into the work, into the innermost and incessant part of the work: quickly: and no one has seen it!

That’s how one feels his presence in these forty pages: now, haven’t you been next to me after all, just a bit, in front of these pictures? …

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: POVERTY. SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE

Rilke returns to the concept of poverty several times.

In this letter, it can be understood as literal, material, “real-life” poverty: the lack of money. But as this storyline unfolds, the more profound, inner meaning becomes more apparent — touching the biblical meaning of poverty as a prerequisite for reaching the kingdom of heaven.

Poverty as the lack of heritage, the lack of cultural baggage we bring to any new experience. In the modern parlance, the lack of “cognitive biases” and social conditioning.

This concept is intrinsically linked to the theme of not being “on anyone’s side”, of love being so completely spent in the act of painting that what remains is simply reality as it is.

SEEING PRACTICE: AS A POOR MAN

In my lifetime, I have certainly spent more time in front of van Gogh’s painting than Rilke did at the time he was writing this letter (if only because I am much older than Rilke was at the time).

And it would have never occurred to me to say that van Gogh sees things “as a poor man”. That is, that something in his vision is set free by his poverty. That he sees something that a rich person would never be able to see.

Can you see in van Gogh’s paintings what Rilke is writing about? More interestingly, is it possible to pause the flow of daily life and see one’s surroundings “as a poor man”, without the baggage of our possessions, our heritage, our experiences, our identities?

Utter lack of prejudice or of pride

November 10, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

… how much there is in all this that reminds one of the “saints” he promised himself and resolved to paint at some much later time! (In that one letter.)

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

This is the second part of Rilke’s description of van Gogh’s portfolio (the first part is here).

Van Gogh’s letter he mentions here is one of his many letters to Theo Van Gogh . On September 10, 1889, he writes:

Had I had the strength to continue, I’d have done portraits of saints and of holy women from life, and who would have appeared to be from another century and they would be citizens of the present day, and yet would have had something in common with very primitive Christians.

OCTOBER 2, 1907 (PART 2)

… Or an old horse, a completely used up old horse: and it is not pitiful and not at all reproachful: it simply is everything they have made of it and what it has allowed itself to become.

Or a garden, or a park, which is seen and shown with the same utter lack of prejudice or of pride;

Vincent Van Gogh. Public park with weeping willow. 1888.

or, simply, things, a chair for instance, nothing but a chair, of the most ordinary kind: and yet, how much there is in all this that reminds one of the “saints” he promised himself and resolved to paint at some much later time! (In that one letter.)

Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh’s chair. 1889. Click to zoom in (on the website of National Gallery, London).

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: THE WORK. REALITY

Another recurrent motive: all aspects of reality are equal in their profound realness, be their chairs, or lawns, or saints. For Rilke, recognition of this fundamental equality is an essential quality of a newly emerging art.

And van Gogh makes this equality more visible to us than we are capable of seeing it ourselves.

SEEING PRACTICE: SIMPLY, THINGS

A click on the reproduction of “Van Gogh’s Chair” will lead you to the high-resolution version on the website of National Gallery.

But what if we could recall this image whenever we see a chair, and realize that they all have the same striking, saint-like, realness of presence and color? I sometimes think that this alone could awaken us from the slumber we tend to call “real life”.

Face-to-face with van Gogh reproductions

November 9, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

And (I) had them today, and gained such joy and insight and strength from them.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke, on van Gogh reproductions

On October 1, 1907, Rilke met an acquaintance of his, Mathilde Vollmoeller, a German painter. She had just returned from Amsterdam with a portfolio of van Gogh reproductions, which she lent to Rilke for a few days.

In this letter, he describes the portfolio, and I did my best to include all the paintings he mentions. Some of them were easy to find. In other cases, many of van Gogh’s paintings would fit Rilke’s description, so I had to choose one or two to bring you as close as possible to re-living Rilke’s experience face-to-face with van Gogh’s reproductions.

I split this letter in two, to give you more time with the paintings.

OCTOBER 2, 1907 (PART 1)

I spent a good, quiet hour: under the protection and in the feeling of yesterday’s letter from you, drinking my last sip of tea, face-to-face with the van Gogh reproductions.

We hadn’t gone through the whole portfolio yesterday, and so I was permitted to take them home with me, and now I have them to myself for a few days. And had them today, and gained such joy and insight and strength from them.

These are plain, not especially sophisticated but very appealing, reproductions of forty works, twenty of them dating back to the time before van Gogh came to France. Paintings, drawings, and lithographs, especially paintings.

Blooming trees (as only Jacobsen could do them),

Vincent van Gogh. Orchard in blossom. 1889. Click to zoom in (on Van Gogh Museum site).

plains in which human figures are distributed and moved about far and wide; and it still goes farther back behind them into the sheet and gets all bright at its farthest reach, as if continuing beyond the limits of the page.

Vincent van Gogh. Tulip fields near the Hague. 1886. Click to zoom in (on Van Gogh Museum site.)

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: COLORS and Words

How implicitly obvious it is for Rilke that there is fundamentally no difference between art forms, between language and color…

Van Gogh does blossoming trees as only Jacobsen could do them (Jens Peter Jacobsen was a Danish poet and novelist, whom Rilke called him his “tutelary spirit” (Back to text)). Be it paints or words, they are but materials for an artist to re-enact reality.

In a sense, what Rilke is gradually learning in these letters is to do landscapes as only Cézanne could do them.

SEEING PRACTICE: VAN GOGH’S indescribable reality

A click on any (or all) of reproductions will bring you to the high-resolution versions on Van Gogh Museum website. You can then zoom in on the blossoms to see just how exactly they are done out of paint (a luxury Rilke couldn’t even dream about).

The more I look at them, the more I appreciate just how alchemy-like painting really is.

Vincent van Gogh. The pink orchard. 1888. Click to zoom in (on Van Gogh Museum site).

Reality indescribable down to its smallest details

November 8, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

… I believe that the only time I lived without loss were the ten days after Ruth’s birth, when I found reality as indescribable, down to its smallest details, as it surely always is…

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

In this letter, Rilke refers to the birth of his daughter, Ruth (1901), and its effect on his state of being.

I looked around for a painting which would embody this effect, and found this painting by Cézanne, which I had never seen before, nor even known of its existence.

Paul Cezanne. Hortense breat-feeding Paul. 1872.

It is so unusual for Cézanne, so utterly unlike any other portraits of his wife, so filled with humble tenderness, so in resonance with Rilke’s letter (although he never mentions it). Perhaps, Cézanne, too, experienced reality differently just after the birth of his child…

SEPTEMBER 13, 1907

One lives so badly, because one always comes into the present unfinished, unable, distracted. I cannot think back on any time of my life without such reproaches and worse.

I believe that the only time I lived without loss were the ten days after Ruth’s birth, when I found reality as indescribable, down to its smallest details, as it surely always is.

<…>

Now that winter’s already impending here. Those vaporous mornings and evenings are already starting, where the sun is merely the place where the sun used to be, and where in the yards all the summer flowers, the dahlias and the tall gladiolas and the long rows of geraniums shout the contradiction of their red into the mist.

This makes me sad. It brings up desolate memories, one doesn’t know why: as if the music of the urban summer were ending in dissonance, in a mutiny of all its notes; perhaps just because one has already once before taken all this so deeply into oneself and read its meanings and made it part of oneself, without ever actually making it.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: LANDSCAPES OF WORDS. PRESENCE

As though in contradiction to his own words about “indescribable reality”, Rilke concludes the letter with one of his striking LANDSCAPES-IN-WORDS, which recreate the visual reality in one’s mind’s eye.

As these landscapes appear in the letters, one after another, we see (or hear?) how Rilke’s vision changes and expands as he takes in and absorbs Cézanne’s way of seeing. This one is not yet quite informed by Cézanne, more “impressionist” in style and quality.

PRESENCE, which appeared in the very first letter as a quality of space, now re-emerges as a quality of life-altering moments in time.

SEEING PRACTICE: Renoir’s indescribable reality

As we go through our days, we don’t really see reality as indescribable. We seem to have names for everything we encounter, often more than one. But in the space of a painting, we glimpse the inadequacy of these words: just how little of what Renoir’s landscape contains and shows can we describe in things-naming words?

But reality is just as indescribable; the trick is to open one’s eyes to see it.

On the trail of the law of our own growth

November 7, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

Basically it’s none of our business how somebody manages to grow, if only he does grow, if only we’re on the trail of the law of our own growth …

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Rilke first came to Paris in 1902, to write a book on Auguste Rodin (he had been introduced to the language of sculpture by his wife, Clara Rilke-Westhoff, who studied under Rodin in 1901).

Rodin and his work had a profound impact on Rilke’s own growth. Now, in 1907, he is working on the second part of his book on Rodin (the first was published in 1903).

JUNE 28, 1907

Auguste Rodin. The Cathedral. 1908. Click to see the details (on Rodin Museum site)

.. and that Rodin does not “think about” his work but remains within it: within the attainable—that is just what we felt made him so exceptional, this humble, patient path he trod through the real: and I have not yet found another faith to replace this one.

In art, you can only stay within the “well done,” and by your staying there, it increases and surpasses you again and again.

It seems to me that the “ultimate intuitions and insights” will only approach one who lives in his work and remains there, and whoever considers them from afar gains no power over them.

But all that already belongs in the area of personal solutions. Basically it’s none of our business how somebody manages to grow, if only he does grow, if only we’re on the trail of the law of our own growth …

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: THE WORK

The artistic process, THE WORK, is another major theme of the book. For Rilke, art is fundamentally the same work, be it poetry, painting or sculpture.

What he sees in Rodin (and later, in Cézanne and van Gogh) is something he strives for himself (and finds himself lacking): being always, unwaveringly “within the work”.

Here, ever-presence “within the work”, within the simple and unambitious “well done”, is opposed to “thinking about it” (and having grand ideas about it).

Here is a more precise description from his monograph on Rodin:

August Rodin. The Hand of God. 1896. Click the image to see the details (on Rodin museum website).

Rodin discovered the fundamental element of his art, as it were, the cell of his world. And this was the plane, the exactly defined plane, of varying size and emphasis, from which all else must be made.

From this time onward it was the subject of his art, the object of all his efforts, of his vigilance and his endurance. His art was not based upon any great idea, but upon the conscientious realization of something small, upon something capable of achievement, upon a matter of technique.

There was no arrogance in him. He devoted himself to this insignificant and difficult aspect of beauty which he could survey, command and judge. The other, the greater beauty, must come when all was ready for it, as animals come to drink when night holds sway and the forest is free of strangers.

In 1903, Rilke wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé:

Somehow I too must discover the smallest constituent element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of expressing everything.

SEEING PRACTICE: HANDS

The sculptures in this post embody the idea of the grand seen and enacted in something small and ever-present, unnoticed, taken for granted: our own hands, and the hands of our fellow human beings.

This beauty we see in Rodin is there for us everywhere we go, literally in our own hands.

All it takes is to pay attention to one’s hands, and to the hands of others: their planes and shapes, and the cathedral-like spaces created when they meet with one another .

Works of art are always the result of one’s having been in danger

November 6, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

… After all, works of art are always the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Nowadays, when more than a century has passed after this letter was written, and “uniqueness” and “self-expression” turned into buzz-words, it may be too easy to assume that everyone now knows what Rilke is talking about, that it is almost “common sense”, “old news”.

So let me mention, right now, a key word which doesn’t appear in the letter straightaway: MADNESS.

To see and experience what nobody else sees and experiences: isn’t it a symptom of madness? But this is also the quintessence of true art.

JUNE 24, 1907

… After all, works of art are always the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.

The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity.

Therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it,—: that it is his epitome; the knot in the rosary at which his life says a prayer, the ever-returning proof to himself of his unity and genuineness, which presents itself only to him while appearing anonymous to the outside, nameless, as mere necessity, as reality, as existence—

So surely we have no choice but to test and try ourselves against the utmost, but probably we are also constrained to keep silence regarding it, to avoid sharing it, parting with it in communication before it has entered the work of art:

Vincent Van Gogh. Landscape from Saint-Rémy. 1889. Click to zoom in (on Google Cultural Institute)

for the utmost represents nothing other than that singularity in us which no one would or even should understand, and which must enter into the work as such, as our personal madness, so to speak, in order to find its justification in the work and show the law in it, like an inborn design that is invisible until it emerges in the transparency of the artistic.

—Nevertheless there are two liberties of communication, and these seem to me to be the utmost possible ones: the one that occurs face-to-face with the accomplished thing, and the one that takes place within actual daily life, in showing one another what one has become through one’s work and thereby supporting and helping and (in the humble sense of the word) admiring one another.

Vincent Van Gogh. Olive trees. 1889. Click to zoom in (on Google Cultural Institute)

But in either case one must show results, and it is not lack of trust or withdrawal or rejection if one doesn’t present to another the tools of one’s progress, which have so much about them that is confusing and tortuous, and whose only value lies in the personal use one makes of them.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: SOLITUDE. SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE

Two interrelated themes of the book begin in this letter: solitude as a quintessential ingredient of art, and the paradoxical interplay between “subjective” and “objective”.

One has to go deep inside oneself, to a deeply personal place — to find the unique point of connection with reality, with existence, with the nameless objective, the utmost.

And this can only happen in solitude, in complete aloneness.

SEEING PRACTICE: van Gogh’s Indescribable reality

The artist Rilke is thinking about in this letter is Vincent van Gogh, and his disastrous attempt to share life and work with Paul Gauguin (he mentions this episode later in the letter).

The singularity of van Gogh’s vision is so utterly unique, so unfathomably deep, that that piece of utmost reality he has reached to and reenacted in his paintings — this piece is not yet integrated into the realm of shared experience. Not fully, not really.

There is still work for us all — to fully open ourselves to this as yet indescribable expansion of human vision he brought to this world.

In this letter, Rilke doesn’t mention any individual paintings, so I have chosen these two landscapes myself. Click either of them to zoom in and see how they emerge out of flurries of colors: a visual experience of objective reality lived through all the way to the end.