Hortense Cezanne

How great this watching of his was, and how unimpeachably accurate

December 17, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

And how great this watching of his was, and how unimpeachably accurate, is almost touchingly confirmed by the fact that, without even remotely interpreting his expression or presuming himself superior to it, he reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter-of-fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 23, 1907

I wondered last night whether my attempt to give you an impression of the woman in the red armchair was at all successful.

I’m not sure that I even managed to describe the balance of its tonal values; words seemed more inadequate than ever, indeed inappropriate; and yet it should be possible to make compelling use of them, if one could only look at such a picture as if it were part of nature—in which case it ought to be possible to express its existence somehow.

For a moment it seemed easier to talk about the self-portrait; apparently it’s an earlier work, it doesn’t reach all the way through the whole wide-open palette, it seems to keep to the middle range, between yellow-red, ocher, lacquer red, and violet purple.

In the jacket and hair it goes all the way to the bottom of a moist -violet brown contending against a wall of gray and pale copper. But looking closer, you discover the inner presence of light greens and juicy blues, which intensify the reddish tones and define the lighter areas more precisely.

Paul Cezanne. Self-portrait in front of pink background. 1875.

In this case, however, the object as such is more tangible, and the words, which feel so unhappy when made to denote purely painterly facts, are only too eager to return to themselves in the description of the man portrayed, for here’s where their proper domain begins.

His right profile is turned by a quarter in the direction of the viewer, looking.

The dense dark hair is bunched together at the back of the head and lies above the ears so that the whole contour of the skull is exposed; it is drawn with eminent assurance, hard and yet round, the brow sloping down and of one piece, its firmness prevailing even where, dissolved into form and surface, it is merely the outermost contour containing a thousand others.

The strong structure of this skull which seems hammered and sculpted from within is reinforced by the ridges of the eyebrows; but from there, pushed forward toward the bottom, shoed out, as it were, by the closely bearded chin, hangs the face, hangs as if every feature had been suspended individually, unbelievably intensified and yet reduced to utter primitivity, yielding that expression of uncontrolled amazement in which children and country people can lose themselves,—except that the gazeless stupor of their absorption has been replaced by an animal alertness which entertains an untiring, objective wakefulness in the unblinking eyes.

And how great this watching of his was, and how unimpeachably accurate, is almost touchingly confirmed by the fact that, without even remotely interpreting his expression or presuming himself superior to it, he reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter-of-fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.

Fare well … for now; perhaps you can see in all this a little of the old man, who deserves the epithet he applied to Pissarro: humble et colossal. Today is the anniversary of his death …

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: The work

Rilke draws an interesting triangle here, between Reality (or “facts”), Colors (painting), and Words (language). Colors and Words are alternative means of portraying Reality, but they are also, in themselves, parts of Reality.

In his description of the portrait of Mme Cézanne, he aimed to approach the painting as if it were part of nature (rather than a representation of something else). Here, he aims to describe not the painting as an independent part of reality, but rather the man represented in the painting, the reality behind the painting — and this is easier for words to do, for here’s where their proper domain begins.

But he is really describing both the painting and the reality reenacted in it, isn’t he?

SEEING PRACTICE: Cézanne

For Rilke, the reality portrayed in the painting seems much more tangible here than in the portrait of Mme Cézanne (I include it below again for the sake of comparison). And for him, this intangibility of the object being portrayed is a sign of Cézanne’s growth as an artist, of the turning point in the evolution of art.

Do you see what he means?

Paul Cezanne. Portrait of Madame Cezanne. 1878.

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…

Touchingly tentative portraits of Madame Cézanne

December 1, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

… they plant themselves for a moment, without looking, next to one of those touchingly tentative portraits of Madame Cézanne, so as to exploit the hideousness of this painting for a comparison which they believe is so favorable to themselves.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 16, 1907 (Part 1)

Human beings, how they play with everything.

How blindly they misuse what has never been looked at, never experienced, distract themselves by displacing all that has been immeasurably gathered together <…>

Paul Cezanne. Portrait of Madame Cezanne. 1985.

You have only to see the people going through the two rooms, say on a Sunday: amused, ironically irritated, annoyed, indignant. And when they finally arrive at some concluding remark, there they stand, these Monsieurs, in the middle of this world, affecting a note of pathetic despair, and you hear them saying: il n’y a absolument rien, rien, rien.

Paul Cezanne. Madame Cezanne with a yellow-armchair. 1890

And the women, how beautiful they appear to themselves as they pass by; they recall that just a little while ago they saw their reflections in the glass doors as they stepped in, with complete satisfaction, and now, with their mirror image in mind, they plant themselves for a moment, without looking, next to one of those touchingly tentative portraits of Madame Cézanne, so as to exploit the hideousness of this painting for a comparison which they believe is so favorable to themselves.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Paul Cezanne. Portrait of Madame Cezanne. 1890.

SOLITUDE

The further one goes along one’s own path, living the experience all the way to the end, the more solitary the journey.

This letter touches two aspects of the artist’s solitude.

One is obvious: the general public’s inability to see what has been shown, to hear what has been said, if it is too radically new, to far removed from their habituated experiences.

The other is hardly mentioned, but it is there nonetheless. It is invoked by Rilke’s mention of the portraits of Mme Cézanne.

SEEING PRACTICE: Portraits of Hortense Fiquet-Cézanne

Cézanne met his future wife, Hortense Fiquet (1850– 1922) in Paris in 1869 (he was thirty years old at the time). Their son, Paul, was born in 1872, but Cézanne had to keep the relationship secret for a long time for fear of being disowned by his father. They married (and Paul was legitimized) only in 1886.

Alex Danchev writes in a note to The Letters of Paul Cézanne:

It is widely believed that she and Cézanne did not have much in common, apart from their son, and that soon enough she came to mean rather little to him.

Against that prejudiced account should be set at least twenty-four portraits, painted over a period of twenty years, long after they had ceased to live together all the time.

Cézanne studied his wife more intently and more durably than he did anyone else, except perhaps himself, to extraordinary effect.

My own experience of these portraits has changed dramatically over time.

As a young girl, all I saw in them was radical objectification. They were painted, I thought, as though there were no interpersonal relationship there, as though he didn’t see a human being in her at all.

But it is not at all the kind of objectification usually meant in the context of gender relationships. He approaches and sees her in the same way he did his mountain, Mont Sainte-Victoire, and as Rilke has reportedly once remarked, “Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.”

While working on this project, I found a very early portrait of Hortense, which stands quite apart from the rest.

Paul Cezanne. Hortense breast-feeding Paul. 1872.

In Rilke’s words, this early portrait says: I love her. If the ladies in the Salon (or me as a young girl) saw this, we would probably have been more touched, more impressed.

But the mature ones only say: HERE SHE IS.

Let me quote from an earlier letter here again, because it is so relevant here:

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.

Reality indescribable down to its smallest details

November 8, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

… I believe that the only time I lived without loss were the ten days after Ruth’s birth, when I found reality as indescribable, down to its smallest details, as it surely always is…

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

In this letter, Rilke refers to the birth of his daughter, Ruth (1901), and its effect on his state of being.

I looked around for a painting which would embody this effect, and found this painting by Cézanne, which I had never seen before, nor even known of its existence.

Paul Cezanne. Hortense breat-feeding Paul. 1872.

It is so unusual for Cézanne, so utterly unlike any other portraits of his wife, so filled with humble tenderness, so in resonance with Rilke’s letter (although he never mentions it). Perhaps, Cézanne, too, experienced reality differently just after the birth of his child…

SEPTEMBER 13, 1907

One lives so badly, because one always comes into the present unfinished, unable, distracted. I cannot think back on any time of my life without such reproaches and worse.

I believe that the only time I lived without loss were the ten days after Ruth’s birth, when I found reality as indescribable, down to its smallest details, as it surely always is.

<…>

Now that winter’s already impending here. Those vaporous mornings and evenings are already starting, where the sun is merely the place where the sun used to be, and where in the yards all the summer flowers, the dahlias and the tall gladiolas and the long rows of geraniums shout the contradiction of their red into the mist.

This makes me sad. It brings up desolate memories, one doesn’t know why: as if the music of the urban summer were ending in dissonance, in a mutiny of all its notes; perhaps just because one has already once before taken all this so deeply into oneself and read its meanings and made it part of oneself, without ever actually making it.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: LANDSCAPES OF WORDS. PRESENCE

As though in contradiction to his own words about “indescribable reality”, Rilke concludes the letter with one of his striking LANDSCAPES-IN-WORDS, which recreate the visual reality in one’s mind’s eye.

As these landscapes appear in the letters, one after another, we see (or hear?) how Rilke’s vision changes and expands as he takes in and absorbs Cézanne’s way of seeing. This one is not yet quite informed by Cézanne, more “impressionist” in style and quality.

PRESENCE, which appeared in the very first letter as a quality of space, now re-emerges as a quality of life-altering moments in time.

SEEING PRACTICE: Renoir’s indescribable reality

As we go through our days, we don’t really see reality as indescribable. We seem to have names for everything we encounter, often more than one. But in the space of a painting, we glimpse the inadequacy of these words: just how little of what Renoir’s landscape contains and shows can we describe in things-naming words?

But reality is just as indescribable; the trick is to open one’s eyes to see it.