The right eyes: Rilke on painting

Rilke on painting

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Intercourse of colors

As if woven of fresh reed

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Rilke continues to describe van Gogh paintings he saw in Bernheim gallery.

OCTOBER 17 (Part 4)

<…> A man’s portrait against a background (yellow and greenish yellow) that looks as if woven of fresh reed (but which, when you step back, is simplified to a uniform brightness):

Vincent van Gogh. Portrait of Trabuc, an attendant at Saint Paul hospital. 1889

An elderly man with a short-cropped, black-and-white mustache, sparse hair of the same color, cheeks indented beneath a broad skull:

the whole thing in black-and-white, rose, wet dark blue, and an opaque bluish white——except for the large brown eyes—

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

COLORS AND WORDS

“As if woven of fresh reed”: could one even imagine a more precise way to describe not only this particular painting, but ALL of van Gogh’s mature work?

Vincent van Gogh. Wheat field with a Reaper. 1890. Click the image to zoom in.

SEEING PRACTICE: VAN GOGH

I remember the exact moment when I realized that what van Gogh shows us is a precise and truthful depiction of HIS visual reality, his unique experience of fluid, dynamic color. It was in Amsterdam, in front of this self-portrait.

Vincent van Gogh. Self-portrait with grey felt hat. 1887. Click the image to zoom in.

Click the image to zoom in (on Van Gogh Museum site) and see this intensified reality, as though woven of fresh reed which borrowed its colors from the rainbow?

 

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 color is totally expended in its realization; there’s no residue

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[Cézanne] somehow makes use of it, personally, as no one has ever used color before, simply for making the object. The color is totally expended in its realization; there’s no residue

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Rilke continues his conversation with Mathilde Vollmoeller in front of Cézanne’s paintings. If you missed the first part of the conversation, here it is.

OCTOBER 12, 1907 (Part 3)

<…> And then we looked at “artistic” things which he may have made in Paris, when he was associating with others, and compared them with those that were unmistakably his own; compared them, that is, with regard to color.

Paul Cezanne. The turn in the road at Auvers. 1873.

In the former, color was something in and for itself; later he somehow makes use of it, personally, as no one has ever used color before, simply for making the object.

The color is totally expended in its realization; there’s no residue.

Paul Cezanne. Mont-Sainte Victoire. C. 1890.

And Miss V. said very significantly:

It’s as if they were placed on a scale: here the thing, there the color; never more, never less than is needed for perfect balance. It might be a lot or a little, that depends, but it’s always the exact equivalent of the object.

I would never have thought of this; but facing the pictures, it is eminently right and revealing.

I also noticed yesterday how unselfconsciously different they are, how unconcerned with being original, confident of not getting lost with each approach toward one of nature’s thousand faces.

Confident, rather, of discovering the inexhaustible nature within by seriously and conscientiously studying her manifold presence outside.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Intercourse of colors. The work

Rilke writes about “discovering the inexhaustible nature within by seriously and conscientiously studying her manifold presence outside“.

Gottfried Richter writes in “Art and Human Consciousness” that Cézanne once said:

The landscape mirrors itself, thinks itself within me… Perhaps this is all nonsense, but it seems to me as though I myself were the subjective consciousness of this landscape…

Richter’s book has no bibliographical references, and I haven’t managed to trace the quote so far. But it resonates strongly with Rilke’s words about the nature within and its presence outside, and their point of connection in painting.

It is also a precise and direct description of a “peak” painting experiences: the experience of a tree, or an apple, or even a shoe seeing ITSELF through the painter.

SEEING PRACTICE: Cézanne (EARLY WORK)

Two landscapes are included with this letter, an early work and a mature one. Can you see the difference in color Rilke writes about here?

In painting you can suddenly come upon something so huge that no one can deal with it

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Zola had understood nothing; it was Balzac who had foreseen or forefelt that in painting you can suddenly come upon something so huge that no one can deal with it.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 9, 1907 (Part 3)

He became well known in Paris, and gradually his fame grew.

But he had nothing but mistrust for any progress that wasn’t of his own making (that others had made, let alone how); he remembered only too well how thoroughly Zola (a fellow Provençal, like himself, and a close acquaintance since early childhood) had misinterpreted his fate and his aspirations in L’Oeuvre.

From then on, any kind of scribbling was out: “Travailler sans le souci de personne et devenir fort—” he once shouted at a visitor.

But when the latter, in the middle of a meal, described the novella about the Chef d’Oeuvre inconnu (I told you about it once), where Balzac, with unbelievable foresight of future developments, invented a painter named Frenhofer who is destroyed by the discovery that there really are no contours but only oscillating transitions—destroyed, that is, by an impossible problem——,

Paul Cezanne. On the bank of a river. 1904-1905. Click to zoom in (on Google Cultural Institute).

the old man, hearing this, stands up, despite Madame Brémond, who surely did not appreciate this kind of irregularity, and, voiceless with agitation, points his finger, clearly, again and again, at himself, himself, himself, painful though that may have been.

Zola had understood nothing; it was Balzac who had foreseen or forefelt that in painting you can suddenly come upon something so huge that no one can deal with it.

 Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Rilke recounts an episode from Émile Bernard’s ‘Memories of Paul Cézanne’ (1907):

one evening, when I spoke to him of “Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu” and Frenhofer, the hero of Balzac’s tragedy, he got up from the table, stood before me and, striking his chest with his index finger, confessed wordlessly by this repeated gesture that he was the very character in the novel. He was so moved that his eyes filled with tears. One of his predecessors, who had a prophetic soul, had understood him. (Translated by Alex Danchev, in The Letters of Paul Cézanne).

Even though Bernard doesn’t say so explicitly, Rilke seems to have inferred that Cézanne hadn’t read the novel. Nothing could be further from truth. Cézanne was a well-educated and well-read man. Alex Danchev writes in his introduction to “The Letters”:

His bedside reading was Balzac: a well-thumbed copy of the “Études philosophiques”, including “Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu”, another source of self-projection.

SEEING PRACTICE: ONENESS AND SEPARATION

The painting I added to this letter is one of those where Cézanne went through the experience of contour-less sensations of color “all the way to the end”. No contours, only “oscillating transitions”, so that the reality itself seems to dissolve just as we are beginning to see it as it is.

A mutual struggle between two procedures

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I think there was a conflict, a mutual struggle between the two procedures of, first, looking and confidently perceiving, and then of appropriating and making personal use of what has been perceived.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Cézanne created his own process of building up color in paintings from life. It was unlike anything the world of painting had seen before.

We know this process from his own letters, and from observations of fellow painters, and, most significantly, from his unfinished works.

To complement Rilke’s description, I have included three paintings of the same motive, which show three different stages of his process.

October 9, 1907 (Part 2)

And all the while <…> he exacerbated the difficulty of his work in the most willful manner. While painting a landscape or a still life, he would conscientiously persevere in front of the subject, but approach it only by very complicated detours.

Beginning with the darkest tones, he would cover their depth with a layer of color that led a little beyond them, and keep going, expanding outward from color to color, until gradually he reached another, contrasting pictorial element, where, beginning at a new center, he would proceed in a similar way.

Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire. 1887.

I think there was a conflict, a mutual struggle between the two procedures of, first, looking and confidently perceiving, and then of appropriating and making personal use of what has been perceived;

Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire. 1890.

that the two, perhaps as a result of becoming conscious, would immediately start opposing each other, talking out loud, as it were, and go on perpetually interrupting and contradicting each other.

Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire. 1895.

And the old man endured their discord, ran back and forth in his studio, which was badly lit because the builder had not found it necessary to pay attention to this strange old bird whom the people of Aix had agreed not to take seriously.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

INTERCOURSE OF COLORS. CONSCIOUS AWARENESS

At this point, Rilke doesn’t really understand the whys and wherefores of Cézanne’s process, but this will change in a few days.

His use of the word “willful” is particularly jarring to my ear, because there is simply no other way to achieve Cézanne’s realization of color. There is nothing willful, nothing random about this process.

Rilke’s note about the mutual struggle of two procedures touches a theme which he returns to, time and again: the artist’s CONSCIOUS AWARENESS of their own process and insights.

SEEING PRACTICE: ONENESS AND SEPARATION

Cézanne wrote to Émile Bernard on October 23, 1905:

So, old as I am, around seventy, the color sensations that create light are the cause of abstractions that do not allow me to cover my canvas, nor to pursue the delimitation of objects when their points of contact are subtle, delicate; the result of which is that my image or painting is incomplete.

On the other hand, the planes fall on top of one another, from which comes the neo-Impressionism that outlines [everything] in black, a defect that must be resisted with all one’s might. But consulting nature gives us the means of achieving this goal.

In the three paintings I attached to this letter, one can see this struggle between overlapping “color sensations” and black contours trying to hold everything together, or rather to keep objects apart.

I don’t see it as a struggle between perception and “appropriation”, as Rilke describes it. Rather, it is a struggle between two modes of perception, one that sees separate objects, and one that sees only unified vibrations of color.