The right eyes: Rilke on painting

Rilke on painting

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Full of mutual understanding

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… airy blue, blue sea, red roofs, talking to each other in Green and very moved in this inner conversation, and full of mutual understanding …

Rainer Maria Rilke

This is the second part of Rilke’s letter from Prague.

NOVEMBER 7, 1907 (Part 2)

Next to this, a nature morte with a blue cover;  between its bourgeois cotton blue and the wall, which is overlaid with a light cloudy bluishness, an exquisite, large, gray-glazed ginger pot holding its own between right and left.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with apples. 1894. Click to zoom in (on Google Art Project).
Auguste Rodin. Eternal Spring. 1900.

An earthy-green bottle of yellow Curaçao and furthermore a clay vase with a green glaze reaching down two thirds of it from the top. On the other side, in the blue cover, some apples have partly rolled out from a porcelain bowl whose white is determined by the cover’s blue.

This rolling of red into blue is an action that seems to arise as naturally from the colorful events in the picture as the relationship between two Rodin nudes does from their sculptural affinity.

And finally a landscape of airy blue, blue sea, red roofs, talking to each other in Green and very moved in this inner conversation, and full of mutual understanding …

Paul Cezanne. The sea at L’Estaque. 1878.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

The metaphor of painting as a conversation among colors unfolds, and now one color (Green) becomes the language the others are using to communicate.

And with this, the letters end, and we are left on our own.

And all we basically have to do is to be there, but simply, ardently, the way the earth simply is, consenting to the seasons, light and dark and altogether in space, not asking to rest upon anything other than the net of influences and forces in which the stars feel secure.

No one outside needs to think himself addressed or accosted

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OCTOBER 24, 1907 (Part 3)

Although one of his idiosyncrasies is to use pure chrome yellow and burning lacquer red in his lemons and apples, he knows how to contain their loudness within the picture: cast into a listening blue, as if into an ear, it receives a silent response from within, so that no one outside needs to think himself addressed or accosted.

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

His still lifes are so wonderfully occupied with themselves.

The frequently used white cloth, for one, which has a peculiar way of soaking up the predominant local color, and the things placed upon it now adding their statements and comments, each with its whole heart.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with curtain and flowered pitcher. 1895.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: Intercourse of colors

On October 21, Rilke wrote about painting as “something that takes place among colors”, their  mutual intercourse being the whole of painting.

Here, this insight unfolds itself through the metaphor of painting as conversation among colors, complete with listening, responding, statements and comments.

Colors talk among themselves, and all the spectator has to do is witness this conversation.

SEEING practice: Cezanne

There are two “listening” colors here, the humble, unobtrusive blue of the first still life, and the white cloth of the second. Do you see how different their listening is?

 

Painting is something that takes place among the colors

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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?

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.

 

 

 

A reality intensified and potentiated to the point of indestructibility

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To achieve the conviction and substantiality of things, a reality intensified and potentiated to the point of indestructibility by his experience of the object, this seemed to him to be the purpose of his innermost work.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

 

In his description of Cézanne as a man, Rilke relied mostly on Émile Bernard, and his article “Souvenirs sur Cézanne” (1907); it doesn’t seem to have been the most reliable of sources (which Rilke intuited).

But Cézanne himself also contributed to a vaguely caricature legend of himself as (in Bernard’s words) “an event which most people no longer had the patience to experience”.

OCTOBER 9, 1907 (PART 1)

… today I wanted to tell you a little about Cézanne.

With regard to his work habits, he claimed to have lived as a Bohemian until his fortieth year. Only then, through his acquaintance with Pissarro, did he develop a taste for work. But then to such an extent that for the next thirty years he did nothing but work.

Actually without joy, it seems, in a constant rage, in conflict with every single one of his paintings, none of which seemed to achieve what he considered to be the most indispensable thing.

Paul Cezanne. Self-portrait in a felt hat. 1894.

La réalisation, he called it, and he found it in the Venetians whom he had seen over and over again in the Louvre and to whom he had given his unreserved recognition.

To achieve the conviction and substantiality of things, a reality intensified and potentiated to the point of indestructibility by his experience of the object, this seemed to him to be the purpose of his innermost work.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

THE WORK

Cézanne writes to Bernard on July 15, 1904:

<…> The greatest, you know them better than I, the Venetians and the Spaniards.

In order to make progress in realization, there is only nature, and an eye educated by contact with it. It becomes concentric by dint of looking and working.

I mean that in an orange, an apple, a ball, a head, there is a culminating point, and this point is always the closest to our eye, the edges of objects recede towards a centre placed at eye level.

With only a little temperament one can be a lot of painter. One can do good things without being either a great harmonist or a great colourist. All you need is an artistic sensibility. And doubtless this sensibility horrifies the bourgeois. So institutes, pensions and honours are only for cretins, jokers and rascals.

Don’t be an art critic, paint. Therein lies salvation.

 

SEEING PRACTICE: Cézanne

It is interesting to look at Cézanne’s own head, in this self-portrait above, with his own description of his way of seeing it:

I mean that in an orange, an apple, a ball, a head, there is a culminating point, and this point is always the closest to our eye, the edges of objects recede towards a centre placed at eye level.

Can you see what he means?