The right eyes: Rilke on painting

Rilke on painting

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Red

No one outside needs to think himself addressed or accosted

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OCTOBER 24, 1907 (Part 3)

Although one of his idiosyncrasies is to use pure chrome yellow and burning lacquer red in his lemons and apples, he knows how to contain their loudness within the picture: cast into a listening blue, as if into an ear, it receives a silent response from within, so that no one outside needs to think himself addressed or accosted.

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

His still lifes are so wonderfully occupied with themselves.

The frequently used white cloth, for one, which has a peculiar way of soaking up the predominant local color, and the things placed upon it now adding their statements and comments, each with its whole heart.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with curtain and flowered pitcher. 1895.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: Intercourse of colors

On October 21, Rilke wrote about painting as “something that takes place among colors”, their  mutual intercourse being the whole of painting.

Here, this insight unfolds itself through the metaphor of painting as conversation among colors, complete with listening, responding, statements and comments.

Colors talk among themselves, and all the spectator has to do is witness this conversation.

SEEING practice: Cezanne

There are two “listening” colors here, the humble, unobtrusive blue of the first still life, and the white cloth of the second. Do you see how different their listening is?

 

The whole picture finally keeps reality in equilibrium

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… 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…

The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness

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As if these colors could heal one of indecision once and for all. The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates you…

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 13, 1907 (Part 2)

Today I went to see his pictures again; it’s remarkable what a surrounding they create.

Without looking at a particular one, standing in the middle between the two rooms, one feels their presence drawing together into a colossal reality.

As if these colors could heal one of indecision once and for all. The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates you; and if you stand among them as ready as possible, you get the impression that they are doing something for you.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with apples. 1894. Click the image to zoom in on Google Cultural Institute.

You also notice, a little more clearly each time, how necessary it was to go beyond love, too; it’s natural, after all, to love each of these things as one makes it: but if one shows this, one makes it less well; one judges it instead of saying it.

Paul Cezanne. Chateau Noir. 1894.

One ceases to be impartial; and the best—love—stays outside the work, does not enter it, is left aside, untranslated: that’s how the painting of moods came about (which is in no way better than the painting of things).

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.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

THE WORK. LOVE. SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE

Isn’t it interesting, and revealing, that Rilke uses the exact same expression, “no residue”, with regard to LOVE and COLOR (in the previous letter)?

He is so decidedly on the side of painting of (and writing) THINGS, not FEELINGS. The objective, not the subjective.

If there is a place for LOVE in a work of art, it is in the process, completely used up in the making. Paradoxically, if it is intentionally expressed, it stays outside the work.

SEEING PRACTICE: CONSCIENCE OF COLOR

The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness…

It is an unusual way to think about colors: do they have conscience, good or bad? Are they truthful, or false?

Or loud, pretentious, deceitful, manipulative?

It is not only about painting, it is also about colors we see daily (even as we look at the screens of our phones, or our computers).

The color of a flower, or a tree trunk, or the sky: they never lie. But what about our houses, and cars, and the visual noise of advertisements?

All of reality is on his side

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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.

Paul Cezanne. The smoker. 1890.

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?