The right eyes: Rilke on painting

Rilke on painting

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Still life

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.

Preoccupied with black

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… black is treated purely as a color, not as its opposite, and is recognized again as a color among colors everywhere

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

The Salon has closed, and Rilke has left Paris for Prague, but this encounter with Cézanne isn’t over yet.

NOVEMBER 4, 1907 (Part 1)

… will you believe that I came to Prague to see Cézannes? … Outside in the Manes-Pavilion, where the Rodin exhibit used to be, there was (as I fortunately learned just in time) an exhibition of modern pictures. The best and most remarkable: Monticelli and Monet well represented, Pissarro adequately; 3 things by Daumier. And 4 Cézannes. (Also van Gogh, Gauguin, Émile Bernard: each with several pieces.)

But Cézanne: a large portrait, a seated man (M. Valabrègue) with lots of black on a lead-black ground. His face, and his fists resting on his lap below, their skin tones intensified all the way to orange, are strongly and unequivocally put there.

Paul Cezanne. Portrait of Anthony Valabregue. 1866.

A still life, equally preoccupied with black; on a smoothly black table a long loaf of white bread in natural yellow, a white cloth, a thick-walled wine glass on a stem, two eggs, two onions, a tin milk container, and, obliquely resting against the loaf, a black knife.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with bread and eggs. 1865

And here, even more than in the portrait, black is treated purely as a color, not as its opposite, and is recognized again as a color among colors everywhere: in the cloth, over whose white it is spread, inside the glass, muting the white of the eggs and weighting the yellow of the onions to old gold.

(Just as, without having quite seen this yellow yet, I surmised that there must have been black with it.)

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Intercourse of Colors. Color Black. Reality

Isn’t it strange and wonderful, how the unfolding of life brings us exactly what we need (or at least it does if we pay attention)?

Not just more of Cézanne, but the miraculous continuation of the theme which both opens and closes his encounter with Cézanne in Paris: the color black.

And so, as this sequence of letters draws to its close, I ask you once again to pay attention to this mysterious color, which is both a color and the absence of it, depending on how we look at it.

There is a hidden, not fully open, parallel, between seeing black as color and “realizing that even something horrible, something that seems no more than disgusting, is, and is valid, along with everything else that is”.

Black and white behave perfectly colorlike next to the other colors

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black and white <…> behave perfectly colorlike next to the other colors, their equal in every way, as if long acclimatized.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 24, 1907 (Part 4)

The use of white as a color was natural to him from the start: together with black, it defined the two limits of his wide-open palette,

Paul Cezanne. The black marble clock. C. 1870.

and in the very beautiful ensemble of a black stone mantelpiece with a pendulum clock, black and white (the latter in a cloth that covers part of the mantel and hangs over its edge) behave perfectly colorlike next to the other colors, their equal in every way, as if long acclimatized.

(Differently than in Manet, whose black has the effect of a light being switched off and yet still stands opposed to the other colors as if coming from some other place.)

Edouard Manet. The lemon. 1880.

Brightly confronting each other on the white cloth are a coffee cup with a heavy dark-blue stripe on the edge, a fresh, ripe lemon, a cut crystal chalice with a sharply scalloped edge, and, way over on the left, a large, baroque triton shell—eccentric and singular in appearance, with its smooth, red orifice facing the front.

Paul Cezanne. The black marble clock. C. 1870.

Its inward carmine bulging out into brightness provokes the wall behind it to a kind of thunderstorm blue, which is then repeated, more deeply and spaciously, by the adjoining gold-framed mantelpiece mirror;

here, in the mirror image, it again meets with a contradiction: the milky rose of a glass vase which, standing on the black pendulum clock, asserts its contrast twice (first in reality, then, a little more yieldingly, in reflection).

Space and mirror-space are definitively indicated and distinguished—musically, as it were—by this double stroke; the picture contains them the way a basket contains fruit and leaves: as if all this were just as easy to grasp and to give.

But there’s still some other object on the bare mantelpiece, pushed up against the white cloth: I’d like to go back to the picture to see what it was.

But the Salon no longer exists; in a few days it will be replaced by an exhibition of automobiles which will stand there, long and dumb, each one with its own idée fixe of velocity.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Presence. Intercourse of colors

As you read this portrait-in-words of a still life, don’t you find it hard to believe that it is written completely from memory?

Earlier, Rilke wrote about the greatness of Cézanne’s watching. In these descriptions from memory, we see his own great watching: the sheer quality of presence and attention he brought to this encounter with Cézanne.

I had to re-read the letter, following the flow of words around the picture with more focused attention, to even find that single object he forgot… Did you?

 

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.

 

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?

The turning point in these paintings

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It is the turning point in these paintings which I recognized, because I had just reached it in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, probably after having long been ready for this one thing which so much depends on.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

October 18, 1907 (Part 1)

<…> I would not have been able to say how far I had developed in the direction corresponding to the immense progress Cézanne achieved in his paintings.

I was only convinced that there are personal inner reasons that allow me to see certain pictures which, a while ago, I might have passed by with momentary sympathy, but would not have revisited with increased excitement and expectation.

It’s not really painting I’m studying (for despite everything, I remain uncertain about pictures and am slow to learn how to distinguish what’s good from what’s less good, and am always confusing early with late works).

It is the turning point in these paintings which I recognized, because I had just reached it in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, probably after having long been ready for this one thing which so much depends on.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with apples. C. 1879.

That’s why I must be careful in trying to write about Cézanne, which of course tempts me greatly now.

It’s a mistake (and I have to acknowledge this once and for all) to think that one who has such private access to pictures is for that reason justified in writing about them; their fairest judge would surely be the one who could quietly confirm them in their existence without experiencing in them anything more or different than facts.

But within my life, this unexpected contact, the way it came and established a place for itself, is full of confirmation and relevance.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

 

Storyline: limitless objectivity

The turning point Rilke feels in Cézanne, and in himself, is the point of LIMITLESS OBJECTIVITY (he will write more about it later on).

Here, it emerges in opposition to his own subjective experience of Cézanne, his “private access”.

But is it possible to see a work of art as an objective fact, without any inner “private access” to it?

SEEING PRACTICE: SIMPLY THINGS

In the beginning of this series, I asked you to pay attention to simple things surrounding you in daily life.

Has anything changed in the way you see them?