The right eyes: Rilke on painting

Rilke on painting

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Subjective and Objective

To feel beyond into the roots and into the earth itself

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One even has to be poor for those who preceded one, otherwise one only reaches back to the time of their rise, of their first brilliance. But one has to feel beyond them into the roots and into the earth itself. One has to be able at every moment to place one’s hand on the earth like the first human being.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

This is one letter I decided to leave without pictures: just Rilke’s words in the sheer power of their purity.

He doesn’t mention any pictures himself, and adding my own visual associations would, as you will see, go completely against the spirit of this letter.

October 20, 1907

<…> I took my Sunday walk to the Salon again; through the quiet Faubourg Saint-Germain, past the palaces, above whose high front gates the old, great names are sometimes still visible: Hôtel de Castries, Hôtel d’Aravay, and over one of them: Hôtel Orloff, belonging to the rich family who rose to superabundance and princely estate with the help of the great Catherine; it produced brilliant chevaliers and also beautiful women whose smiles endowed their lineage with a past, Princesses Orloff, admired by all of Paris.

You know: there’s the highly arched gateway in the front building, massive and heavy, windows on the right and left which are so uninterested in looking outside that they turn their backs on the street; only the concierge’s window is clear and attentive in front of its modestly parted curtains. But as soon as one of the weighty wings of the gate opens, refulgent in its smooth dark green, the gaze can no longer be restrained.

Beyond the semidarkness of the gateway, the palace steps back as if to show itself (the way someone might show off a new dress), far away from the street.

Its middle door, which is all of glass, tosses a few stairs down toward the gravel of the untouched courtyard, and standing behind all the windows, which are scarcely smaller than the door, are curtains, as if in beautiful dresses. Where they are missing, one can see the ribbon of the staircase being gently led up in tranquil ascent.

And one senses the coolness of a vestibule, with cold walls that are reserved and unparticipating, like servants at the table, and whose only purpose is to pass the candelabras around in the evening.

One senses, too, and believes, that these palaces have royal rooms in the interior, there is something in one’s blood that belongs in there, and for a second the whole gamut of emotions rests between the heaviness of bronze-encased ancient Chinese porcelain and the lightness of a chime’s voice:

—but one goes to the picture gallery, where none of this means anything, at least not the way it stands there in the rue Saint-Dominique, nor the way it can be in a little bit of blood that occasionally runs through one’s heart with a scent like that of an old perfume.

But all this will have to be shed, dismissed, put away.

Even someone who had such palaces to utter would have to approach them innocently and in poverty, and not as someone who could still be seduced by them.

Surely one has to take one’s impartiality to the point where one rejects the interpretive bias even of vague emotional memories, prejudices, and predilections transmitted as part of one’s heritage, taking instead whatever strength, admiration, or desire emerges with them, and applying it, nameless and new, to one’s own tasks.

One has to be poor unto the tenth generation.

One even has to be poor for those who preceded one, otherwise one only reaches back to the time of their rise, of their first brilliance. But one has to feel beyond them into the roots and into the earth itself. One has to be able at every moment to place one’s hand on the earth like the first human being.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: POVERTY

Rilke returns to the storyline of poverty. Not so much material poverty, but rather letting go all cultural associations, emotional memories, heritage, identity.

All this, however precious and cherished, has to be shed if one is to cleanse the doors of perception.

SEEING PRACTICE: POVERTY

As we look at the world around us, we usually don’t notice the background stream of associations and memories unless something really stirs us, just as we don’t usually hear the sound of our own heartbeat.

But the first step to being able to see the world “like the first human being” is to notice this stream of associations, yo pay attention to it.

 

Self-overcoming on the way to new bliss

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This lying-down-with-the-leper and sharing all one’s own warmth with him, including the heart-warmth of nights of love: this must at some time have been part of an artist’s existence, as a self-overcoming on the way to his new bliss.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 19, 1907 (Part 1)

I’m sure you remember … in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the place that deals with Baudelaire and his poem: “Carrion.” I couldn’t help thinking that without this poem, the whole trend toward plainspoken truth which we now seem to recognize in Cézanne could not have started; first it had to be there in all its inexorability.

Paul Cezanne. The card players. 1896.

First, artistic perception had to surpass itself to the point of realizing that even something horrible, something that seems no more than disgusting, is, and is valid, along with everything else that is.

Vincent van Gogh. Prisoners’ round. 1890.

Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything that exists: a single refusal at any time, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.

Paul Cezanne. Strangled woman. 1872.

Flaubert, in retelling the legend of Saint-Julien-l’hospitalier with so much discretion and care, showed me this simple believability in the midst of the miraculous, because the artist in him participated in the saint’s decisions, and gave them his happy consent and applause.

This lying-down-with-the-leper and sharing all one’s own warmth with him, including the heart-warmth of nights of love: this must at some time have been part of an artist’s existence, as a self-overcoming on the way to his new bliss.

Paul Cezanne. Preparation for the funeral. 1869.

You can imagine how it moves me to read that even in his last years, Cézanne had memorized this very poem—Baudelaire’s Charogne—and recited it word for word. Surely one could find examples among his earlier works where he mightily surpassed himself to achieve the utmost capacity for love.

Paul Cezanne. Hortense breat-feeding Paul. 1872.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: Limitless objectivity

Rilke writes:

Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything that exists: a single refusal at any time, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.

But is this only about artists, or about every single one of us?

I think we have reached the point in evolution where neither of us is permitted to turn their back on anything that exists. Otherwise, we are all doomed.

Artists were just in the vanguard (haven’t they always been in the vanguard of humanity’s evolution?)

SEEING PRACTICE: LOOKING AT UGLINESS

Is it as simple, and as difficult, as this: to see the sheer beauty of the world, one must learn not to turn back on its ugliness?

In “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge”, Rilke writes:

Do you remember Baudelaire’s incredible poem “Une Charogne”? Perhaps I understand it now. Except for the last stanza, he was in the right. What should he have done after that happened to him? It was his task to see, in this terrifying and apparently repulsive object, the Being that underlies all individual beings. There is no choice, no refusal. Do you think it was by chance that Flaubert wrote his “Saint Julien l’Hospitalier”? This, it seems to me, is the test: whether you can bring yourself to lie beside a leper and warm him with the warmth of your own heart—such an action could only have good results. (Translated by Stephen Mitchell, Vintage International Edition (1990)).

Charles Baudelaire. The Carcase

The object that we saw, let us recall,
This summer morn when warmth and beauty mingle —
At the path’s turn, a carcase lay asprawl
Upon a bed of shingle.

Legs raised, like some old whore far-gone in passion,
The burning, deadly, poison-sweating mass
Opened its paunch in careless, cynic fashion,
Ballooned with evil gas.

On this putrescence the sun blazed in gold,
Cooking it to a turn with eager care —
So to repay to Nature, hundredfold,
What she had mingled there.

The sky, as on the opening of a flower,
On this superb obscenity smiled bright.
The stench drove at us, with such fearsome power
You thought you’d swoon outright.

Flies trumpeted upon the rotten belly
Whence larvae poured in legions far and wide,
And flowed, like molten and liquescent jelly,
Down living rags of hide.

The mass ran down, or, like a wave elated
Rolled itself on, and crackled as if frying:
You’d think that corpse, by vague breath animated,
Drew life from multiplying.

Through that strange world a rustling rumour ran
Like rushing water or a gust of air,
Or grain that winnowers, with rhythmic fan,
Sweep simmering here and there.

It seemed a dream after the forms grew fainter,
Or like a sketch that slowly seems to dawn
On a forgotten canvas, which the painter
From memory has drawn.

Behind the rocks a restless cur that slunk
Eyed us with fretful greed to recommence
His feast, amidst the bonework, on the chunk
That he had torn from thence.

Yet you’ll resemble this infection too
One day, and stink and sprawl in such a fashion,
Star of my eyes, sun of my nature, you,
My angel and my passion!

Yes, you must come to this, O queen of graces,
At length, when the last sacraments are over,
And you go down to moulder in dark places
Beneath the grass and clover.

Then tell the vermin as it takes its pleasance
And feasts with kisses on that face of yours,
I’ve kept intact in form and godlike essence
Our decomposed amours!

— From Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952). Click for other translations.

Here is a translation of Flaubert’s retelling of The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller.

Limitless objectivity

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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.

The turning point in these paintings

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It is the turning point in these paintings which I recognized, because I had just reached it in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, probably after having long been ready for this one thing which so much depends on.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

October 18, 1907 (Part 1)

<…> I would not have been able to say how far I had developed in the direction corresponding to the immense progress Cézanne achieved in his paintings.

I was only convinced that there are personal inner reasons that allow me to see certain pictures which, a while ago, I might have passed by with momentary sympathy, but would not have revisited with increased excitement and expectation.

It’s not really painting I’m studying (for despite everything, I remain uncertain about pictures and am slow to learn how to distinguish what’s good from what’s less good, and am always confusing early with late works).

It is the turning point in these paintings which I recognized, because I had just reached it in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, probably after having long been ready for this one thing which so much depends on.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with apples. C. 1879.

That’s why I must be careful in trying to write about Cézanne, which of course tempts me greatly now.

It’s a mistake (and I have to acknowledge this once and for all) to think that one who has such private access to pictures is for that reason justified in writing about them; their fairest judge would surely be the one who could quietly confirm them in their existence without experiencing in them anything more or different than facts.

But within my life, this unexpected contact, the way it came and established a place for itself, is full of confirmation and relevance.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

 

Storyline: limitless objectivity

The turning point Rilke feels in Cézanne, and in himself, is the point of LIMITLESS OBJECTIVITY (he will write more about it later on).

Here, it emerges in opposition to his own subjective experience of Cézanne, his “private access”.

But is it possible to see a work of art as an objective fact, without any inner “private access” to it?

SEEING PRACTICE: SIMPLY THINGS

In the beginning of this series, I asked you to pay attention to simple things surrounding you in daily life.

Has anything changed in the way you see them?

Invoking infinite stillness

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And what hands: Buddha hands that know how to sleep, that lie down smoothly after all has passed, with fingers adjoining, to rest for centuries at the edge of a lap, lying with the palms facing up, or else steeply raised at the wrist, invoking infinite stillness.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Rilke describes his visit to the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, to see Rodin’s drawings. Here is the first part of this description.

He mentions “the dancing girls of King Sisowath”, a troupe of Cambodian dancers who accompanied King Sisowath during his 1906 visit to France. Rodin attended their performance in the Pré-Catelan, Paris on  July 10, 1906, and then followed them to Marseilles (they left the country on July 20)

October 15, 1907 (Part 2)

Auguste Rodin. Cambodian Dancer. 1906.
Click the image for details and to zoom in (on Rodin Museum site)

There were about fifteen new sheets which I found scattered among the others, all from the time when Rodin followed the dancing girls of King Sisowath on their tour so as to be able to admire them longer and better. <…>

There they were, these small graceful dancers, like transformed gazelles; the two long, slender arms drawn through the shoulders, through the slenderly massive torso (with the full slenderness of Buddha images) as if made of a single piece, long hammered out in the workshop, down to the wrists, upon which the hands then assumed their poses, agile and independent, like actors on the stage.

Auguste Rodin. Cambodian Dancer. 1906. Click the image for more details and to zoom in (Rodin Museum site).

 

And what hands: Buddha hands that know how to sleep, that lie down smoothly after all has passed, with fingers adjoining, to rest for centuries at the edge of a lap, lying with the palms facing up, or else steeply raised at the wrist, invoking infinite stillness.

These hands in wakefulness: imagine.

These fingers spread, open, starlike, or curved in upon each other as in a rose of Jericho; these fingers delighted and happy or else frightened, displaying at the very end of the long arms: themselves dancing.

And the whole body is used to keep this outermost dancing balanced: in the air, in its own atmosphere, in the gold of an Eastern aura.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

 

There is more information on the impression they made on Rodin on the Rodin Museum site (click the images to zoom in and see more detailed descriptions and quotes from Rodin).

The work

This letter is a wonderful illustrations of ever-present fluid mutual influences between art forms and cultures. The ancient culture of movement, translated into drawings by Rodin, and then both of them re-enacted in Rilke’s words.

SEEING PRACTICE: RODIN

The most remarkable aspect of these drawings is Rodin’s ability to drop all details to re-enact movements of the dancers. He said to Georges Bourdon (in an article for the newspaper Le Figaro on August 1, 1906):

… if they are beautiful, it is because they have a natural way of producing the right movements…

Do you see how the minimalistic simplicity of these drawings allows Rodin to represent a movement? Can you feel this movement inside your own body?

 

The error of writing about art

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… as always when I fall into the error of writing about art, it was valid more as a personal and provisional insight than as a fact objectively derived from the presence of the pictures.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Rodin’s drawings were announced as a part of that year’s Salon, but something went wrong. Instead, they were exhibited at Bernheim-Jeune, a Parisian art gallery. So Rilke went there to see them.

He had already seen many of them while working with Rodin on his biography.

OCTOBER 15, 1907 (Part 1)

There indeed were the drawings, many pages which I already knew, which I had helped frame in those cheap white-gold frames that were ordered in such enormous quantities, back then.

Which I knew: but did I really know them?

There was so much in them that seemed different to me (is it Cézanne? Is it the passing of time?); what I had written about them two months ago had receded to the limits of validity.

It still was valid, somewhere; but, as always when I fall into the error of writing about art, it was valid more as a personal and provisional insight than as a fact objectively derived from the presence of the pictures.

Auguste Rodin. Drawing. Click the image to see more at Tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica

It bothered me that they were so self-explanatory, so easy to interpret; I found myself limited precisely by what ordinarily seemed to open up all sorts of vistas. I would have preferred them like that, without any statement, more discreet, more factual, left alone with themselves.

I admired individual pieces in a new way, and rejected others which seemed to glitter in the reflections of their interpretation; until I reached works which I had not known.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE

The theme of “subjective and objective” in art is present in the letters in two guises, from two (apparently different) vantage points:

From the point of view of an artist: do I express (subjective) feelings, or (objective) facts, THINGS, reality?

And as a spectator, or a reader: do I connect with a work of art because it touches me personally, subjectively? Or dare I look beyond that, into the reality of its objective presence?

But if a poet writes about art, these vantage points are merged together.

SEEING PRACTICE: OBJECTIVE PRESENCE

We are often attracted to works of art that have some personal emotional significance for us; that resonate with something in our own interior, on a deeply personal, subjective level. Is this the only way to really CONNECT with a painting, or a song, or a poem?

What Rilke, I think, dances around and approaches from different angles is that a work of art tells (or shows) us a glimpse of objective reality, beyond and above any personal significance we might project onto it.

It is interesting to think about one’s favorite painting(s) in this way: not in terms of one’s own emotional response to them, but as a pathway to a richer reality.