Colors and words

As if woven of fresh reed

December 6, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

Rilke continues to describe van Gogh paintings he saw in Bernheim gallery.

OCTOBER 17 (Part 4)

<…> A man’s portrait against a background (yellow and greenish yellow) that looks as if woven of fresh reed (but which, when you step back, is simplified to a uniform brightness):

Vincent van Gogh. Portrait of Trabuc, an attendant at Saint Paul hospital. 1889

An elderly man with a short-cropped, black-and-white mustache, sparse hair of the same color, cheeks indented beneath a broad skull:

the whole thing in black-and-white, rose, wet dark blue, and an opaque bluish white——except for the large brown eyes—

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

COLORS AND WORDS

“As if woven of fresh reed”: could one even imagine a more precise way to describe not only this particular painting, but ALL of van Gogh’s mature work?

Vincent van Gogh. Wheat field with a Reaper. 1890. Click the image to zoom in.

SEEING PRACTICE: VAN GOGH

I remember the exact moment when I realized that what van Gogh shows us is a precise and truthful depiction of HIS visual reality, his unique experience of fluid, dynamic color. It was in Amsterdam, in front of this self-portrait.

Vincent van Gogh. Self-portrait with grey felt hat. 1887. Click the image to zoom in.

Click the image to zoom in (on Van Gogh Museum site) and see this intensified reality, as though woven of fresh reed which borrowed its colors from the rainbow?

Blows and slashes of tree- and bush-green

December 5, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

Another painting by van Gogh, but how different are its greens… one can hardly believe that we can use one word to name these colors.

OCTOBER 17, 1907 (Part 3)

A park or an alley in a town park in Arles, with black people on benches on the right and left, a blue newspaper reader in front and a violet woman in the back, beneath and among blows and slashes of tree- and bush-green.

Vincent Van Gogh. Entrance to the public garden in Arles. 1888

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: COLORS AND WORDS

Yesterday, we looked at a green that was deep and utterly shallow in artificial wakefulness. Today, it is tree- and bush-green in full sunlight.

SEEING PRACTICE: COLOR GREEN

Compare the greens of the park with the greens of the night cafe. What is it that makes them so radically different?

Deep and utterly shallow green

December 4, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

… artificial wakefulness in wine red, lamp yellow, deep and utterly shallow green…

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Rilke goes to Bernheim’s gallery to see Rodin’s drawings, but there he encounters van Gogh again.

There is only a couple of sentences in today’s segment, and the painting Rilke talks about. I didn’t want to dilute the sheer power of synergy between this painting and the words.

OCTOBER 17, 1907 (PART 2)

First Mr. Bernheim took me to his storage room and showed me: van Goghs. The night café I already wrote about;

but a lot more could be said about its artificial wakefulness in wine red, lamp yellow, deep and utterly shallow green, with three mirrors, each of which contains a different emptiness.

STORYLINE: COLORS AND WORDS

How can something be both deep and utterly shallow?

And yet, this paradoxical phrase captures the quality of this painting’s green with perfect precision.

SEEING PRACTICE: COLOR

There is striking, painful, naked simplicity in this color composition. But for all its simplicity, I think no one but van Gogh could have pulled this off.

I don’t want to influence your perception here, but if you are interested in my take on it, you can read it here (preferably after you’ve spent some time with the painting on your own).

…the generosity of a born landscape

December 3, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

And all this lies out there with the generosity of a born landscape, and casts forth space.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

October 17, 1907 (Part 1)

<….> But the morning was bright.

A broad east wind invading us with a developed front, because he finds the city so spacious.

On the opposite side, westerly, blown, pushed out, cloud archipelagos, island groups, gray like the neck and chest feathers of aquatic birds in an ocean of cold, too remotely blissful barely-blue.

Paul Cezanne. Ile de France Landscape. 1880.

And underneath all this, low, there’s still the Place de la Concorde and the trees of the Champs-Éysées, shady, a black simplified to green, beneath the western clouds. Toward the right there are houses, bright, windblown, and sunny, and far off in the background in a blue dove-gray, houses again, drawn together in planes, a serried row of straight-edged quarrylike surfaces.

And suddenly, as one approaches the obelisk (around whose granite there is always a glimmering of blond old warmth and in whose hieroglyphic hollows, especially in the repeatedly recurring owl, an ancient Egyptian shadow-blue is preserved, dried up as if in the wells of a paint box), the wonderful Avenue comes flowing toward you in a scarcely perceptible downward slope, fast and rich and like a river which with the force of its own violence, ages ago, drilled a passageway through the sheer cliff of the Arc de Triomphe back there by the Étoile.

Paul Cezanne. House with red roof. 1890.

And all this lies out there with the generosity of a born landscape, and casts forth space.

And from the roofs, there and there, the flags keep rising into the high air, stretching, flapping as if to take flight: there and there.

That’s what my walk to the Rodin drawings was like today.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: LANDSCAPE OF WORDS

As a painter, I know how to make landscapes out of paint. It is my craft.

But Rilke’s landscapes made of words are pure, breathtaking magic. I SEE how his words arise from a synergy with Cézanne’s color planes — and I did my best to share my vision with you with the paintings included in this letter.

I do see, but cannot even remotely understand.

SEEING PRACTICE: BORN LANDSCAPE (INDESCRIBABLE REALITY)

Between Cézanne’s colors and Rilke’s words, the landscape itself — any landscape — anything that arises, be it in your vision or mine, turns into a work of art.

I sometimes pause to remember this: these “born landscapes” pass in front of our eyes every single moment, and each is utterly unique. There never has been, nor will ever be, this exact constellation of light, point of view, and the spectator’s unique sense of vision. This work of art arises with the generosity of a born landscape, and disappears to give birth to another one; most of them unnoticed, unseen.

These landscapes are gifts from Nature, and from countless generations of artists that shaped and expanded our sense of vision. All one has to do is RECEIVE these abundant gifts.

Invoking infinite stillness

November 30, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

And what hands: Buddha hands that know how to sleep, that lie down smoothly after all has passed, with fingers adjoining, to rest for centuries at the edge of a lap, lying with the palms facing up, or else steeply raised at the wrist, invoking infinite stillness.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Rilke describes his visit to the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, to see Rodin’s drawings. Here is the first part of this description.

He mentions “the dancing girls of King Sisowath”, a troupe of Cambodian dancers who accompanied King Sisowath during his 1906 visit to France. Rodin attended their performance in the Pré-Catelan, Paris on July 10, 1906, and then followed them to Marseilles (they left the country on July 20)

October 15, 1907 (Part 2)

Auguste Rodin. Cambodian Dancer. 1906.
Click the image for details and to zoom in (on Rodin Museum site)

There were about fifteen new sheets which I found scattered among the others, all from the time when Rodin followed the dancing girls of King Sisowath on their tour so as to be able to admire them longer and better. <…>

There they were, these small graceful dancers, like transformed gazelles; the two long, slender arms drawn through the shoulders, through the slenderly massive torso (with the full slenderness of Buddha images) as if made of a single piece, long hammered out in the workshop, down to the wrists, upon which the hands then assumed their poses, agile and independent, like actors on the stage.

Auguste Rodin. Cambodian Dancer. 1906. Click the image for more details and to zoom in (Rodin Museum site).

And what hands: Buddha hands that know how to sleep, that lie down smoothly after all has passed, with fingers adjoining, to rest for centuries at the edge of a lap, lying with the palms facing up, or else steeply raised at the wrist, invoking infinite stillness.

These hands in wakefulness: imagine.

These fingers spread, open, starlike, or curved in upon each other as in a rose of Jericho; these fingers delighted and happy or else frightened, displaying at the very end of the long arms: themselves dancing.

And the whole body is used to keep this outermost dancing balanced: in the air, in its own atmosphere, in the gold of an Eastern aura.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

There is more information on the impression they made on Rodin on the Rodin Museum site (click the images to zoom in and see more detailed descriptions and quotes from Rodin).

The work

This letter is a wonderful illustrations of ever-present fluid mutual influences between art forms and cultures. The ancient culture of movement, translated into drawings by Rodin, and then both of them re-enacted in Rilke’s words.

SEEING PRACTICE: RODIN

The most remarkable aspect of these drawings is Rodin’s ability to drop all details to re-enact movements of the dancers. He said to Georges Bourdon (in an article for the newspaper Le Figaro on August 1, 1906):

… if they are beautiful, it is because they have a natural way of producing the right movements…

Do you see how the minimalistic simplicity of these drawings allows Rodin to represent a movement? Can you feel this movement inside your own body?

Urge to comprehend everything

November 27, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

…how deeply we are placed on the ground of all transformation, we most changeable ones who walk about with the urge to comprehend everything and (because we’re unable to grasp it) reduce immensity to the action of our heart, for fear that it might destroy us.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 13, 1907 (Part 1)

Early this morning I read about your autumn, and all the colors you brought into your letter were changed back in my feelings and filled my mind to the brim with strength and radiance.

Yesterday, while I was admiring the dissolving brightness of autumn here, you were walking through that other autumn back home, which is painted on red wood, as this one’s painted on silk.

And the one reaches us as much as the other; that’s how deeply we are placed on the ground of all transformation, we most changeable ones who walk about with the urge to comprehend everything and (because we’re unable to grasp it) reduce immensity to the action of our heart, for fear that it might destroy us.

Paul Cezanne. Large pine and read earth. 1895.

If I were to come and visit you two, I would surely also see the pageant of moor and heath, the hovering bright green of the meadows, the birches, with new and different eyes.

Though this transformation is something I’ve completely experienced and shared before, in part of the Book of Hours, nature was then still a general inducement for me, an evocation, an instrument in whose strings my hands found themselves again.

I was not yet sitting before her; I allowed myself to be swept away by the soul that emanated from her; she came over me with her vastness, her grand exaggerated presence, the way prophesy came over Saul; exactly like that.

I walked about and saw, saw not nature but the visions she gave me. How little I would have been able to learn from Cézanne, from van Gogh, then. I can tell how much I’ve changed by the way Cézanne challenges me now.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

COLORS AND WORDS. REALITY

Rilke mentions his book of poems, The Book of Hours: Love poems to God, as a premonition of the transformation he is experiencing in 1907.

Here is a poem from this collection which, I think, gives us a glimpse of what he means (translation by Babette Deutsch, from 2009 edition):

Although, as from a prison walled with hate,
each from his own self labors to be free,
the world yet holds a wonder, and how great!
ALL LIFE IS LIVED: now this comes home to me.
But who, then, lives it? Things that patiently
stand there, like some unfingered melody
that sleeps within a harp as day is going?
Is it the winds, across the waters blowing,
is it the branches, beckoning each to each,
is it the flowers, weaving fragrances,
the aging alleys that reach out endlessly?
Is it the warm beasts, moving to and fro,
is it the birds, strange as they sail from view?
This life — who really lives it? God, do you?

SEEING: we most changeable ones

The rhythms of nature are so varied: some things exist on a time scale for grander than our own, others arise and disappear before our eyes, like waves, or in the course of a single day or season, like flowers.

So what does he mean when he says: “we most changeable ones”?

As we go through life, it is so easy to get caught in the illusion of our own sameness. Our environment changes, but the self seems to be constant.

But when one truly sees, sitting before Nature (like a dog), having let go of this urge to comprehend everything, then all that remains of the self is the fluid, constantly changing vantage point.