Paul Cezanne

A monograph on the color blue

November 16, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

I could imagine someone writing a monograph on the color blue, from the dense waxy blue of the Pompeiian wall paintings to Chardin and further to Cézanne: what a biography!

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

We are still in the Louvre, with Rilke tracing the origins of Cézanne’s color.

OCTOBER 8, 1907 (PART 2)

Contemporaneously with Guardi and Tiepolo, a woman too was painting, a Venetian, who came to all the courts and whose name was among the most well known of her time: Rosalba Carriera.

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Three portraits are in the Louvre. A young lady, her face raised up by the straight neck and then turned naively toward the viewer, and in front of her décolleté lace dress she holds a small clear-eyed capuchin monkey who is peering out from the lower edge of the half-length portrait as eagerly as she’s looking out on top, just a bit more indifferently.

He’s reaching out with one small perfidious black hand to draw her tender, distracted hand into the picture by one slender finger.

Rosalba Carriera. Young girl holding a monkey. 1721.

This is so full of one period that it is valid for all times. And it is lovely and lightly painted, but really painted. There’s also a blue cloak in the picture and one whole lilac-white gillyflower stem, which, strangely, takes the place of a breast ornament.

And I noticed that this blue is that special eighteenth-century blue that you can find everywhere, in La Tour,

Maurice Quentin de La Tour. Portrait of King Louis XV. 1748.

in Peronnet,

and which even in Chardin does not cease to be elegant, even though here, as the ribbon of his peculiar hood (in the self-portrait with the horn-rimmed pince-nez), it is used quite recklessly.

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin. Self-Portrait with Spectacles. 1771.

(I could imagine someone writing a monograph on the color blue, from the dense waxy blue of the Pompeiian wall paintings to Chardin and further to Cézanne: what a biography!)

For Cézanne’s very unique blue is descended from these, it comes from the eighteenth-century blue which Chardin stripped of its pretension and which now, in Cézanne, no longer carries any secondary significance.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

MONOGRAPH on THE COLOR BLUE

Heinrich Wiegand Petzet writes in his introduction to “Letters on Cézanne”:

In one of the letters, he speaks of the possibility of writing a monograph on the color blue, beginning with the pastels of Rosalba Carriera and the special blue of the eighteenth century, whereupon he mentions Cézanne’s “very unique blue.” In the course of the letters he produces a series of variations of this blue, formulations whose expressive power exceeds everything that has ever been said about this color.

Here are some of these formulations:

completely supportless blue
cold, too remotely blissful barely-blue
blue dove-gray
an ancient Egyptian shadow-blue
self-contained blue
listening blue
thunderstorm blue
bourgeois cotton blue
densely quilted blue, and finally:
full of revolt Blue, Blue, Blue.

He is writing this monograph on the color blue, in these very letters.

Isn’t it strange how one’s best work sometimes happens not as “work”, but just so, as the unfolding of life, without pretension?

Gradually stripping everything of pretension: the color blue, the apples, the work: this is the deepest motive of these letters. For Rilke, this is also the quintessence of the evolution of art, be it poetry or painting.

SEEING PRACTICE: THE COLOR BLUE

A lot of color nuances disappear in reproductions, but it is still possible to get a glimpse of the evolution of blue Rilke writes about.

But is it just the evolution of painting, or the evolution of our sense of vision?

Or of the color blue itself?

After all, color as we know it doesn’t exist without vision; it is a product of the brain.

The magic of painting is in its ability to create a space where the brain shakes off some of its habituated routines, and is able to perceive color differently, more richly, more intensely than in “real life”. And some of this can then spill over into our “normal” vision — that’s how art expands and cleanses our visual perception.

As you go through your day, notice the color blue as you see it in nature. Has you perception shifted in response to the paintings you have just seen?

All of reality is on his side

November 14, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

Here, all of reality is on his side: in this dense quilted blue of his, in his red, and his shadowless green, and the reddish black of his wine bottles.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Finally, Cézanne. After the long detour of yesterday’s letter, Rilke faces this new reality head-on, without further delays.

He says so much in a single sentence that I had to add four paintings to re-create it in images. These might not be the exact same paintings he saw on that day, but he isn’t really writing about individual paintings, but rather about all of them simultaneously.

OCTOBER 7, 1907

You know how much more remarkable I always find the people walking about in front of paintings than the paintings themselves. It’s no different in this Salon d’Automne, except for the Cézanne room.

Here, all of reality is on his side: in this dense quilted blue of his,

Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir. 1904-1906. Click to zoom in (on Google Cultural Institute site)

in his red

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

and his shadowless green

Paul Cezanne. View of L’Estaque and Chateaux-d’If. 1885.

and the reddish black of his wine bottles.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with soup tureen. 1884.

And the humbleness of all his objects: the apples are all cooking apples and the wine bottles belong in the roundly bulging pockets of an old coat.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: COLORs and WORDS

How can one make landscapes and things out of WORDS as Cézanne made them out of colors?

This challenge is implicitly always there in the letters, and one way Rilke faces it is through finding new ways of naming the colors themselves.

This letter is a tentative beginning of what would blossom into color-filled prose by the end of the month.

SEEING PRACTICE: COLOR BLUE

I have chosen one painting for each color mentioned in Rilke’s letter, but my choice may be arbitrary and subjective. ALL Cézanne’s colors are there in every painting, but in very different versions of themselves.

I wonder what Rilke really meant, and Clara Rilke saw in her mind’s eye when she read this phrase, “this dense quilted blue of his“. There are many different blues even in the paintings included here.

What came up in my mind’s eye was this very specific kind of blue, the blue of the sky above Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir (1904-1906), spilling into the folds of this painting’s mountain, and into the shadows of its greenery.

Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir. 1904-1906.

But I wonder, can this phrase also point to ALL of Cézanne’s blues, to something they all share?

For us, Cézanne is valid and moving and important

November 13, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

Cézanne is no longer possible for the old lady; but for us he is valid and moving and important.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Rilke’s first visit to the Salon d’Automne, to Cézanne’s retrospective exhibition which is at the heart of the boo (Cézanne had died in 1906). A strange letter, suspended as it is between two alternative realities, the fictional no less real than the real.

Cézanne is not mentioned till the very last sentence, as though Rilke didn’t yet know how to approach him with words, and so invented a longer, round-about, path between the past and the future, lingering in the past.

OCTOBER 6, 1907

The old closed-down hotels in the Faubourg Saint-Germain with their white-gray shutters, their discreet gardens and courtyards, the locked ironwork gates and heavy, tight-shutting doors.

Some of them were very haughty and sophisticated and inaccessible. These may have been the Talleyrands, the de la Rochefoucaulds, unapproachable gentry.

But then came a street that was just as quiet with somewhat smaller houses, no less noble in their manner and quite reserved.

One of the gates was just about to close; a servant in his morning livery turned around again and looked at me carefully and thoughtfully. And at that same moment it seemed to me that it would have taken only a very slight shift in the pattern of things at some time in order for him to recognize me and step back and hold open the door.

In order for an old lady to be up there, a grand-mère who would make it possible to receive her favorite grandson even at this early hour.

Edouard Manet. Interior at Arcachon. 1871

Now it is hard to believe that this was the way that led to the Salon d’Automne. But finally I did arrive at the bright and colorful picture market, which, for all its straining to make an impression, did not dispel my inner mood.

The old lady persisted, and I felt how much it would be beneath her dignity to come and look at these pictures.

I wondered whether I might not find something I could tell her about after all, and found a room with pictures by Berthe Morisot (Manet’s sister-in-law)

Berthe Morisot. Young-woman on a couch. 1885

and a wall with works by Eva Gonzales (Manet’s student).

Cézanne is no longer possible for the old lady; but for us he is valid and moving and important.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

The OLD and THE NEW

The old lady that Rilke conjures up in this letter resonates so strikingly with this painting by Edouard Manet, but it is never mentioned in the letter: both Manet and Cézanne, with their radical, world-overthrowing newness, are touched only obliquely here.

Rilke is not that old lady, but the old lady is Rilke. Where else could she have appeared from?

Isn’t it the past within him, the past in Cézanne is not yet possible, and which longs still for something calmer, something less radical?

SEEING PRACTICE: Cézanne indescribable reality

Paul Cézanne. Trees and Rocks, Near the Château Noir. 1900-1906. Click to zoom in (on Google Art Project site).

It may be hard for us now, in the twenty first century, to recognize Cézanne’s radical newness. The expansion of vision he expressed in painting has been integrated, to a degree at least, into our own sense of vision.

Can a modern viewer experience the original puzzlement and resistance Cézanne’s contemporaries, including Rilke, must have felt in front of his paintings? Well, we can try — if only to appreciate afresh how different our sense of vision now is.

For this seeing practice, I chose a painting which, I believe, makes it easier. Click through to zoom in and see how hard it must have been to reconcile this way of seeing with more conventional representations of visual reality.

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.

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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.

Whatever is present is utterly and urgently present

November 5, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

…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.