Mathilde Vollmoeller

He (Cézanne) sat there in front of it like a dog, just looking, without any nervousness, without any ulterior motive

Mathilde Vollmoeller to Rainer Maria Rilke

OCTOBER 12, 1907 (Part 2)

I recently asked Mathilde Vollmoeller to go through the Salon with me sometime, so that I could see my impression in the presence of someone whom I believe to be calm and not distracted by literature. Yesterday we went there together.

Cézanne prevented us from getting to anything else. I notice more and more what an event this is. But imagine my surprise when Miss V., with her painterly training and eye, said:

He sat there in front of it like a dog, just looking, without any nervousness, without any ulterior motive.

And she said some very good things about his manner of working (which one can decipher in an unfinished picture). “Here,” she said, pointing to one spot,

this he knew, and now he’s saying it (a part of an apple); right next to it there’s an empty space, because that was something he didn’t know yet. He only made what he knew, nothing else.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with water jug. 1893.

“What a good conscience he must have had,” I said. “Oh yes: he was happy, way inside somewhere …”

THE WORK

On October 9, Rilke described Cézanne’s process as “willful“.

What a distance to today’s insight (in the span of only three days, and one conversation with a painter friend): he only painted what he knew.

The very opposite of willfulness.

This is the essence of Cézanne process.

SEEING PRACTICE: LIKE A DOG (INDESCRIBABLE REALITY)

What does it mean: he sat there like a dog? I think it means LANGUAGE-LESS: without letting words interfere with his perception of reality, indescribable reality.

It must have been especially significant for Rilke, whose life’s work was to reenact reality in WORDS.

But it is also something nearly impossible to achieve to any of us, so deeply we are all caught in the internalized models of reality created by our languages. Most of the time, we only see things we can name.

What if we all could find some time and space today to see the world as it is, as vibrations of light and color, if even for a brief moment?

And (I) had them today, and gained such joy and insight and strength from them.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke, on van Gogh reproductions

On October 1, 1907, Rilke met an acquaintance of his, Mathilde Vollmoeller, a German painter. She had just returned from Amsterdam with a portfolio of van Gogh reproductions, which she lent to Rilke for a few days.

In this letter, he describes the portfolio, and I did my best to include all the paintings he mentions. Some of them were easy to find. In other cases, many of van Gogh’s paintings would fit Rilke’s description, so I had to choose one or two to bring you as close as possible to re-living Rilke’s experience face-to-face with van Gogh’s reproductions.

I split this letter in two, to give you more time with the paintings.

OCTOBER 2, 1907 (PART 1)

I spent a good, quiet hour: under the protection and in the feeling of yesterday’s letter from you, drinking my last sip of tea, face-to-face with the van Gogh reproductions.

We hadn’t gone through the whole portfolio yesterday, and so I was permitted to take them home with me, and now I have them to myself for a few days. And had them today, and gained such joy and insight and strength from them.

These are plain, not especially sophisticated but very appealing, reproductions of forty works, twenty of them dating back to the time before van Gogh came to France. Paintings, drawings, and lithographs, especially paintings.

Blooming trees (as only Jacobsen could do them),

Vincent van Gogh. Orchard in blossom. 1889. Click to zoom in (on Van Gogh Museum site).

plains in which human figures are distributed and moved about far and wide; and it still goes farther back behind them into the sheet and gets all bright at its farthest reach, as if continuing beyond the limits of the page.

Vincent van Gogh. Tulip fields near the Hague. 1886. Click to zoom in (on Van Gogh Museum site.)

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: COLORS and Words

How implicitly obvious it is for Rilke that there is fundamentally no difference between art forms, between language and color…

Van Gogh does blossoming trees as only Jacobsen could do them (Jens Peter Jacobsen was a Danish poet and novelist, whom Rilke called him his “tutelary spirit” (Back to text)). Be it paints or words, they are but materials for an artist to re-enact reality.

In a sense, what Rilke is gradually learning in these letters is to do landscapes as only Cézanne could do them.

SEEING PRACTICE: VAN GOGH’S indescribable reality

A click on any (or all) of reproductions will bring you to the high-resolution versions on Van Gogh Museum website. You can then zoom in on the blossoms to see just how exactly they are done out of paint (a luxury Rilke couldn’t even dream about).

The more I look at them, the more I appreciate just how alchemy-like painting really is.