The right eyes: Rilke on painting

Rilke on painting

Main navigation

Intercourse of colors

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?

Limitless objectivity

by

It is this limitless objectivity, refusing any kind of meddling in an alien unity, that strikes people as so offensive and comical in Cézanne’s portraits.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

October 18, 1907 (Part 2)

<…> This labor which no longer knew any preferences or biases or fastidious predilections, whose minutest component had been tested on the scales of an infinitely responsive conscience, and which so incorruptibly reduced a reality to its color content that it resumed a new existence in a beyond of color, without any previous memories.

Paul Cezanne. Rocks at L’Estaque. C. 1882.

It is this limitless objectivity, refusing any kind of meddling in an alien unity, that strikes people as so offensive and comical in Cézanne’s portraits.

They accept, without realizing it, that he represented apples, onions, and oranges purely by means of color (which they still regard as a subordinate means of painterly practice), but as soon as he turns to landscape they start missing the interpretation, the judgment, the superiority, and when it comes to portraits, there is that rumor concerning the artist’s intellectual conception, which has been passed on even to the most bourgeois, so successfully that you can already see the signs of it in Sunday photographs of couples and families.

Paul Cezanne. Little girl with a doll. 1904.

And here Cézanne naturally strikes them as utterly inadequate and not worthy of discussion.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

SEEING PRACTICE: Cézanne’s portraits

I think Rilke is absolutely right: Cézanne’s limitless objectivity becomes almost unbearable to us, threatening even, in PORTRAITS.

What stares us in the face is the fleeting, illusory nature of our feelings and concerns and, ultimately, of our selves and our subjective identities. It is not exactly flattering to the ego to see itself reducible to color content…

The idea of “artist’s intellectual conception” is as good a defense against this realization as any.

Always postponing and yet already painting

by

OCTOBER 17, 1907 (Part 5)

… and finally: one of those landscapes he was always postponing and yet already painting again and again:

Vincent van Gogh. Wheat field with a Reaper. 1890. Click to zoom in on van Gogh Museum site.

a setting sun, yellow and orange red, surrounded by its glow of yellow, round fragments.

Against it, full of revolt, Blue, Blue, Blue the slope of curved hills, separated from the twilight by a strip of assuaging pulsations (a river?), in which, transparent in dark antique gold, in the slanted front third of the picture, you can make out a field and leaning groups of upright sheafs of corn.

THE WORK

The work we are postponing, waiting for the time when we are finally ready to do it: and yet already doing it.

Rilke writes about van Gogh, but perhaps even more so, about himself.

He is postponing the work on his autobiographical novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and already writing it, in these letters. Some passages were eventually included in the book verbatim.

He is full of doubts about writing about Rodin, and yet already writing about him, too.

And, strikingly, as we will see soon, he doesn’t just POSTPONE, but resolves NOT to write about Cézanne… because he doesn’t consider himself qualified.

But the work gets done, in its own time and rhythm, quite oblivious to our decisions.

The best we can do is not to get in its way with our doubts and transient concerns.

SEEING PRACTICE: VAN GOGH’S indescribable reality

Yesterday, I wrote about the moment I got a glimpse of van Gogh’s visual reality in front of his self-portrait.

But even after that moment, it took a long, long time to even begin to integrate his expansion of vision into my experience of life, to finally get “the right eyes”.

It takes essentially the same practice Rilke describes in these letters: the practice of paying your full attention first to paintings, and then, with the eyes trained and cleansed by them, to the world around us.