The right eyes: Rilke on painting

Rilke on painting

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Paris

…the generosity of a born landscape

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And all this lies out there with the generosity of a born landscape, and casts forth space.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

October 17, 1907 (Part 1)

<….> But the morning was bright.

A broad east wind invading us with a developed front, because he finds the city so spacious.

On the opposite side, westerly, blown, pushed out, cloud archipelagos, island groups, gray like the neck and chest feathers of aquatic birds in an ocean of cold, too remotely blissful barely-blue.

Paul Cezanne. Ile de France Landscape. 1880.

And underneath all this, low, there’s still the Place de la Concorde and the trees of the Champs-Éysées, shady, a black simplified to green, beneath the western clouds. Toward the right there are houses, bright, windblown, and sunny, and far off in the background in a blue dove-gray, houses again, drawn together in planes, a serried row of straight-edged quarrylike surfaces.

Pau Cezanne. Bibemus quarry. 1898.

And suddenly, as one approaches the obelisk (around whose granite there is always a glimmering of blond old warmth and in whose hieroglyphic hollows, especially in the repeatedly recurring owl, an ancient Egyptian shadow-blue is preserved, dried up as if in the wells of a paint box), the wonderful Avenue comes flowing toward you in a scarcely perceptible downward slope, fast and rich and like a river which with the force of its own violence, ages ago, drilled a passageway through the sheer cliff of the Arc de Triomphe back there by the Étoile.

Paul Cezanne. House with red roof. 1890.

And all this lies out there with the generosity of a born landscape, and casts forth space.

And from the roofs, there and there, the flags keep rising into the high air, stretching, flapping as if to take flight: there and there.

That’s what my walk to the Rodin drawings was like today.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

 STORYLINE: LANDSCAPE OF WORDS

As a painter, I know how to make landscapes out of paint. It is my craft.

But Rilke’s landscapes made of words are pure, breathtaking magic. I SEE how his words arise from a synergy with Cézanne’s color planes — and I did my best to share my vision with you with the paintings included in this letter.

I do see, but cannot even remotely understand.

SEEING PRACTICE: BORN LANDSCAPE (INDESCRIBABLE REALITY)

Between Cézanne’s colors and Rilke’s words, the landscape itself — any landscape — anything that arises, be it in your vision or mine, turns into a work of art.

I sometimes pause to remember this: these “born landscapes” pass in front of our eyes every single moment, and each is utterly unique. There never has been, nor will ever be, this exact constellation of light, point of view, and the spectator’s unique sense of vision. This work of art arises with the generosity of a born landscape, and disappears to give birth to another one; most of them unnoticed, unseen.

These landscapes are gifts from Nature, and from countless generations of artists that shaped and expanded our sense of vision. All one has to do is RECEIVE these abundant gifts.

Whatever is present is utterly and urgently present

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…and whatever is present is utterly and urgently present, as if prostrate on its knees and praying for you …

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

This book wasn’t written as a book. It is a sequence of letters to the poet’s wife, written in 1907 from Paris. Its intertwining themes and motives emerged organically — as though designed by the unfolding of life itself, both within Rilke’s inner space, and outside.

The Rilke we hear in “Letters on Cézanne” is not yet the Rilke we know from his mature work. He is right in the midst of becoming the artist he is destined to become. And these letters are not only on Cézanne, not only on painting — they record and embody this act of becoming, forged in a synergetic fire between poetry and painting, between words and colors.

 

JUNE 3, 1907

… seeing and working—how different they are here. Everywhere else you see, and think: later—. Here they’re almost one and the same.

You’re back again: that’s not strange, not remarkable, not striking; it’s not even a celebration; for a celebration would already be an interruption. But this here takes you and goes further with you and goes with you to everything and right through everything, through small things and great.

Paul Cezanne. Still life, bowl and Milk Jug. C. 1877. Click to zoom in on Google Cultural Institute website.

Everything that was rearranges itself, lines up in formation, as if someone were standing there giving orders; and whatever is present is utterly and urgently present, as if prostrate on its knees and praying for you …

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Storyline: Presence

PRESENCE (a concept much less in vogue back in 1907 than it is now) is one the core themes of the book. Here, Rilke links it to a place, to being in Paris (he had returned there several days before).

But does this experience come from the place one is in, or from one’s inner space, or from some kind of emerging resonance between the two? (How many people in Paris felt it on June 3, 1907, I wonder…)

SEEING PRACTICE: Things lined up in formation

Although Cézanne is not present in the letter (at least not explicitly), this small still life jumped at me as a perfect companion to it, so full it is of the same urgent presence.

In later work, Cézanne would arrange complex still life set-ups, but this one is so utterly simple. It is a kind of “composition” every one of us passes by multiple times every single day without noticing. Two things lined up in formation on the kitchen table.

Just two things on the kitchen table — what is there to notice, to pay attention to? Even most painting textbooks would advise that two things never make a good composition.

In Cézanne’s eyes, they are “utterly and urgently present, as if prostrate on its knees and praying for you …”. This is the visual experience shared in this painting, and now it is up to us to expand it from the space of painting and into the space of our daily lives.