The right eyes: Rilke on painting

Rilke on painting

Main navigation

Intercourse of colors

A reality intensified and potentiated to the point of indestructibility

by

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?

 

Every insight has its parvenus

by

… 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.