Colour

Black and white behave perfectly colorlike next to the other colors

December 21, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

black and white <…> behave perfectly colorlike next to the other colors, their equal in every way, as if long acclimatized.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 24, 1907 (Part 4)

The use of white as a color was natural to him from the start: together with black, it defined the two limits of his wide-open palette,

Paul Cezanne. The black marble clock. C. 1870.

and in the very beautiful ensemble of a black stone mantelpiece with a pendulum clock, black and white (the latter in a cloth that covers part of the mantel and hangs over its edge) behave perfectly colorlike next to the other colors, their equal in every way, as if long acclimatized.

(Differently than in Manet, whose black has the effect of a light being switched off and yet still stands opposed to the other colors as if coming from some other place.)

Brightly confronting each other on the white cloth are a coffee cup with a heavy dark-blue stripe on the edge, a fresh, ripe lemon, a cut crystal chalice with a sharply scalloped edge, and, way over on the left, a large, baroque triton shell—eccentric and singular in appearance, with its smooth, red orifice facing the front.

Its inward carmine bulging out into brightness provokes the wall behind it to a kind of thunderstorm blue, which is then repeated, more deeply and spaciously, by the adjoining gold-framed mantelpiece mirror;

here, in the mirror image, it again meets with a contradiction: the milky rose of a glass vase which, standing on the black pendulum clock, asserts its contrast twice (first in reality, then, a little more yieldingly, in reflection).

Space and mirror-space are definitively indicated and distinguished—musically, as it were—by this double stroke; the picture contains them the way a basket contains fruit and leaves: as if all this were just as easy to grasp and to give.

But there’s still some other object on the bare mantelpiece, pushed up against the white cloth: I’d like to go back to the picture to see what it was.

But the Salon no longer exists; in a few days it will be replaced by an exhibition of automobiles which will stand there, long and dumb, each one with its own idée fixe of velocity.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Presence. Intercourse of colors

As you read this portrait-in-words of a still life, don’t you find it hard to believe that it is written completely from memory?

Earlier, Rilke wrote about the greatness of Cézanne’s watching. In these descriptions from memory, we see his own great watching: the sheer quality of presence and attention he brought to this encounter with Cézanne.

I had to re-read the letter, following the flow of words around the picture with more focused attention, to even find that single object he forgot… Did you?

No one outside needs to think himself addressed or accosted

December 20, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

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?

The whole picture finally keeps reality in equilibrium

December 16, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

… 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…

Painting is something that takes place among the colors

December 13, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

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.

Do you see how different this contrast seems when it appears in the context of the whole picture plane?

The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness

November 28, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

As if these colors could heal one of indecision once and for all. The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates you…

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 13, 1907 (Part 2)

Today I went to see his pictures again; it’s remarkable what a surrounding they create.

Without looking at a particular one, standing in the middle between the two rooms, one feels their presence drawing together into a colossal reality.

As if these colors could heal one of indecision once and for all. The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates you; and if you stand among them as ready as possible, you get the impression that they are doing something for you.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with apples. 1894. Click the image to zoom in on Google Cultural Institute.

You also notice, a little more clearly each time, how necessary it was to go beyond love, too; it’s natural, after all, to love each of these things as one makes it: but if one shows this, one makes it less well; one judges it instead of saying it.

One ceases to be impartial; and the best—love—stays outside the work, does not enter it, is left aside, untranslated: that’s how the painting of moods came about (which is in no way better than the painting of things).

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.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

THE WORK. LOVE. SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE

Isn’t it interesting, and revealing, that Rilke uses the exact same expression, “no residue”, with regard to LOVE and COLOR (in the previous letter)?

He is so decidedly on the side of painting of (and writing) THINGS, not FEELINGS. The objective, not the subjective.

If there is a place for LOVE in a work of art, it is in the process, completely used up in the making. Paradoxically, if it is intentionally expressed, it stays outside the work.

SEEING PRACTICE: CONSCIENCE OF COLOR

The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness…

It is an unusual way to think about colors: do they have conscience, good or bad? Are they truthful, or false?

Or loud, pretentious, deceitful, manipulative?

It is not only about painting, it is also about colors we see daily (even as we look at the screens of our phones, or our computers).

The color of a flower, or a tree trunk, or the sky: they never lie. But what about our houses, and cars, and the visual noise of advertisements?