The right eyes: Rilke on painting

Rilke on painting

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Landscape

Full of mutual understanding

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… airy blue, blue sea, red roofs, talking to each other in Green and very moved in this inner conversation, and full of mutual understanding …

Rainer Maria Rilke

This is the second part of Rilke’s letter from Prague.

NOVEMBER 7, 1907 (Part 2)

Next to this, a nature morte with a blue cover;  between its bourgeois cotton blue and the wall, which is overlaid with a light cloudy bluishness, an exquisite, large, gray-glazed ginger pot holding its own between right and left.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with apples. 1894. Click to zoom in (on Google Art Project).
Auguste Rodin. Eternal Spring. 1900.

An earthy-green bottle of yellow Curaçao and furthermore a clay vase with a green glaze reaching down two thirds of it from the top. On the other side, in the blue cover, some apples have partly rolled out from a porcelain bowl whose white is determined by the cover’s blue.

This rolling of red into blue is an action that seems to arise as naturally from the colorful events in the picture as the relationship between two Rodin nudes does from their sculptural affinity.

And finally a landscape of airy blue, blue sea, red roofs, talking to each other in Green and very moved in this inner conversation, and full of mutual understanding …

Paul Cezanne. The sea at L’Estaque. 1878.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

The metaphor of painting as a conversation among colors unfolds, and now one color (Green) becomes the language the others are using to communicate.

And with this, the letters end, and we are left on our own.

And all we basically have to do is to be there, but simply, ardently, the way the earth simply is, consenting to the seasons, light and dark and altogether in space, not asking to rest upon anything other than the net of influences and forces in which the stars feel secure.

The inner equilibrium of Cézanne’s colors

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… the inner equilibrium of Cézanne’s colors, which never stand out or obtrude, evokes this calm, almost velvetlike air which is surely not easily introduced into the hollow inhospitality of the Grand Palais.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

October 24, 1907 (Part 2)

When I made this remark, that there is nothing actually gray in these pictures (in the landscapes, the presence of ocher and of unburnt and burnt earth colors is too palpable for gray to develop),

Paul Cezanne. Chestnut Trees at the Jas de Bouffan. 1887. Click to zoom in (on Google Art Institute website).

Miss Vollmoeller pointed out to me how, standing among them, one feels a soft and mild gray emanating from them as an atmosphere,

Paul Cezanne. Still Life with Curtain and Flowered Pitcher. 1985.

and we agreed that the inner equilibrium of Cézanne’s colors, which never stand out or obtrude, evokes this calm, almost velvetlike air which is surely not easily introduced into the hollow inhospitality of the Grand Palais.

Paul Cezanne. Harlequin. 1890. Click to zoom in (on Google Art Institute website).

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: INTERCOURSE OF COLORS

Many painters and art historians have attempted to define “color harmony”, and my guess is, these attempts will go on so long as men can breath and eyes can see. 

This is in our nature, to try and “define” our words, our languages teasing us everyday with the organic fluidity of what we (with charmingly naive arrogance) call “meanings”.

(Rilke wrote once that happy is he who knows that beyond all languages sits the Unsayable.)

But I don’t expect that, in my lifetime, I will see a better description of what “color harmony” actually is than what Rilke gives in this letter.

SEEING PRACTICE: COLOR HARMONY

Cézanne mastered every register of this ancient organ of color. He could fill the seemingly grey with every color of the rainbow (and more), and bring the boldest, most intense colors into the state of quiet conversation with one another.

The paintings I have chosen for this segment range from the muted lightness of an evening forest to the bold pattern of Harlequin’s attire. Yet the effect described by Rilke is there in all and every one of them.

 

Gray, literally gray, cannot be found in Cézanne’s pictures

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To his immensely painterly eye it didn’t hold up as a color: he went to the core of it and found that it was violet there or blue or reddish or green.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 24, 1907 (Part 1)

… I said: gray—yesterday, when I described the background of the self-portrait, light copper obliquely crossed by a gray pattern.

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

I should have said: a particular metallic white, aluminum or something similar, for gray, literally gray, cannot be found in Cézanne’s pictures.

To his immensely painterly eye it didn’t hold up as a color: he went to the core of it and found that it was violet there or blue or reddish or green.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with red onions. 1896- 1898. Click to zoom in (on Google Art Project).

He particularly likes to recognize violet (a color which has never been opened up so exhaustively and so variously) where we only expect and would be contented with gray;

but he doesn’t relent and pulls out all the violet hues that had been tucked inside, as it were; the way certain evenings, autumn evenings especially, will address the graying facades directly as violet, and receive every possible shade for an answer, from a light floating lilac to the heavy violet of Finnish granite.

Paul Cezanne. A turn in the road. 1882. Click the image to zoom in (on Google Art Project).

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: Intercourse of colors

If I were to name my absolute favorite in this extraordinary sequence of letters, this may well be the one.

It embodies and reenacts the very essence of painting: its ability to open our eyes to what we haven’t seen before, couldn’t even imagine seeing.

And Rilke not only describes, but intensifies this effect: what one might have missed in Cézanne, one cannot miss now, once it is named.

And the way he compares Cézanne to autumn evenings, in his ability to pull out colors from nature, to make the nature respond to the painter’s eye, just like it responds to the sunlight…

SEEING PRACTICE: GREY

Even the imperfections of reproductions conspire to help us see what Rilke is talking about here.

In the still life above, the reproduction pulls out and exaggerates the colors hidden in Cézanne grays. If you click to zoom in, you will see a more muted (and closer to life) image; but zoom in on the gray areas, on all the secret hues of grey. Zoom in on the landscape to see how difficult it is to transmit this experience of grey in reproduction.

And what about “real life”? Can one “zoom in” on its grey areas to recognize the hues which so often stay unseen, both literally and metaphorically?

Painting is something that takes place among the colors

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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.

Paul Cezanne. Fruit and jug on a table. C. 1894.

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

All we basically have to do is to be there, but simply, ardently

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… all we basically have to do is to be there, but simply, ardently, the way the earth simply is, consenting to the seasons, light and dark and altogether in space, not asking to rest upon anything other than the net of influences and forces in which the stars feel secure.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 19, 1907 (Part 2)

<…> After this devotion, in small ways at first, lies the beginning of sainthood: the simple life of a love that endured; that, without ever boasting of it, approaches everything, unaccompanied, inconspicuous, wordless.

Paul Cezanne. Bather 1887.

The real work, the abundance of tasks, begins, all of it, after this enduring, and whoever has not been able to come this far may well get to see the Virgin Mary in Heaven, and certain saints and minor prophets as well, and King Saul and Charles le Téméraire—:

but as for Hokusai and Leonardo, Li Tai Pe and Villion, Verhaeren, Rodin, Cézanne—of these, not to mention the good Lord, all he will ever learn, even there, is hearsay.

Paul Cezanne. Christ in limbo. 1867.

Ah, we compute the years and divide them here and there and stop and begin and hesitate between the two.

But how very much of one piece is everything we encounter, how related one thing is to the next, how it gave birth to itself and grows up and is educated in its own nature,

Paul Cezanne. In the woods. 1898.

and all we basically have to do is to be there, but simply, ardently, the way the earth simply is, consenting to the seasons, light and dark and altogether in space, not asking to rest upon anything other than the net of influences and forces in which the stars feel secure.

Some day the time and composure and patience must also be there to let me continue writing the Notebooks of Malte Laurids; I now know much more about him, or rather: the knowledge will be there when it is needed …

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

THE WORK

I read this letter, and see a miracle.

Here and now, in this moment, we are witnessing Rilke becoming what he is, and has always been, and will always be.

The real work begins after enduring…

SEEING PRACTICE: how related one thing is to the next

Rilke writes:

But how very much of one piece is everything we encounter, how related one thing is to the next…

Our brains are trained to see separate objects, not how inseparable they are from what surrounds them. But find a moment or two in your day, and pay attention to how things are related, to the spaces in between, to how very much of one piece is everything. Just rest your awareness in the space BETWEEN objects, not on the objects themselves.

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.