The right eyes: Rilke on painting

Rilke on painting

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Still life

He sat there in front of it like a dog, just looking

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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?

Apples indestructible in their stubborn thereness

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In Cézanne they cease to be edible altogether, that’s how thing-like and real they become, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Earlier in this letter, Rilke wrote about the evolution of the colour blue in painting, and Chardin as the intermediary on the path from the eighteenth-century blue to Cézanne’s blue.

Here, he traces a fundamentally similar development in the way objects are treated in painting.

OCTOBER 8, 1907 (Part 3)

… Chardin was the intermediary in other respects, too; his fruits are no longer thinking of a gala dinner, they’re scattered about on kitchen tables and don’t care whether they are eaten beautifully or not.

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin. The Silver Goblet. 1728.

In Cézanne they cease to be edible altogether, that’s how thing-like and real they become, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness.

Paul Cezanne. Apples. 1878.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

POVERTY

In this letter, the theme of poverty may not be obvious (elsewhere, Rilke writes that Cézanne’s apples are all “cooking apples”; that is, a poor man’s apples). Here, it is not about poverty in the narrow, literal sense, but about the lack of pretenses, cultural symbolisms, refinements — these hallmarks of civilized, wealthy society.

Cézanne’s apples are simply things, seen and painted as they are, without any human meanings attached or implied (including being edible).

Paul Cezanne. Still life with apples and pears. 1887

SEEING PRACTICE: SIMPLY THINGS (APPLES)

We go through life projecting meanings and emotions onto things, and not even noticing that we do it most of the time. These projections shape our reality, which essentially means that they prevent us from SEEING reality.

Just notice how hard it can be to see an apple as it is, in its plain, objective thereness, without attaching any words and sensations to it, so that it is not tasty, or fresh, or healthy, or beautiful,  or anything like this at all. It is neither a sign of autumn harvest, nor the symbol of the fall of man. It simply is.

It is in this plain THERENESS that Rilke feels affinity with Cézanne.

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?

 

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.