[Cézanne] somehow makes use of it, personally, as no one has ever used color before, simply for making the object. The color is totally expended in its realization; there’s no residue
Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke
Rilke continues his conversation with Mathilde Vollmoeller in front of Cézanne’s paintings. If you missed the first part of the conversation, here it is.
OCTOBER 12, 1907 (Part 3)
<…> And then we looked at “artistic” things which he may have made in Paris, when he was associating with others, and compared them with those that were unmistakably his own; compared them, that is, with regard to color.
In the former, color was something in and for itself; later he somehow makes use of it, personally, as no one has ever used color before, simply for making the object.
The color is totally expended in its realization; there’s no residue.
And Miss V. said very significantly:
It’s as if they were placed on a scale: here the thing, there the color; never more, never less than is needed for perfect balance. It might be a lot or a little, that depends, but it’s always the exact equivalent of the object.
I would never have thought of this; but facing the pictures, it is eminently right and revealing.
I also noticed yesterday how unselfconsciously different they are, how unconcerned with being original, confident of not getting lost with each approach toward one of nature’s thousand faces.
Confident, rather, of discovering the inexhaustible nature within by seriously and conscientiously studying her manifold presence outside.
Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke
Intercourse of colors. The work
Rilke writes about “discovering the inexhaustible nature within by seriously and conscientiously studying her manifold presence outside“.
Gottfried Richter writes in “Art and Human Consciousness” that Cézanne once said:
The landscape mirrors itself, thinks itself within me… Perhaps this is all nonsense, but it seems to me as though I myself were the subjective consciousness of this landscape…
Richter’s book has no bibliographical references, and I haven’t managed to trace the quote so far. But it resonates strongly with Rilke’s words about the nature within and its presence outside, and their point of connection in painting.
It is also a precise and direct description of a “peak” painting experiences: the experience of a tree, or an apple, or even a shoe seeing ITSELF through the painter.
SEEING PRACTICE: Cézanne (EARLY WORK)
Two landscapes are included with this letter, an early work and a mature one. Can you see the difference in color Rilke writes about here?