Colors and words

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

November 25, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

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?

A few regular light planes, like the face in a portrait by Manet

November 24, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

Everything is simplified, reduced to a few regular light planes, like the face in a portrait by Manet. And nothing is insignificant and superfluous.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 12, 1907 (Part 1)

These are the days where everything is all around you, luminous, light, barely intimated in the bright air and yet distinct; even what is nearest has the tones of distance about it, is taken away and only shown, instead of being put there, as usual;

Paul Cezanne. Houses at the l’Estaque. 1880.

and all the things that are related to distance—the river, the bridges, the long streets, and the extravagant squares—have been absorbed and hugged close by that distance, are painted upon it, as if on silk.

Paul Cezanne. Bend in Forest Road. 1906.

Edouard Manet. Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets. 1872.

You can feel what a light-green carriage can be on the Pont-Neuf or some red that can’t contain itself, or simply a poster on the fire wall of a pearl-gray group of houses. Everything is simplified, reduced to a few regular light planes, like the face in a portrait by Manet.

And nothing is insignificant and superfluous.

The bouquinistes along the quai are opening their boxes, and the fresh or withered yellow of the books, the violet brown of the volumes, the green of a portfolio: everything is right, is valid, takes part, adds its sound to the ensemble of bright correspondences.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

LANDSCAPE OF WORDS. THE WORK

Another of Rilke’s landscapes, now with a direct comparison to a painting. And not to a landscape even, this would have been too straightforward. To a portrait!

This landscape, including this comparison, was later included, almost word-by-word, in Rilke’s novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge — “work” done not as “work”, just as a fruit of unfolding life.

SEEING PRACTICE: Nature like Paintings

The common sense is to compare paintings to nature: are they true to life? Are they realistic?

But the way we see nature is informed by paintings we see, and let sink deeply into our sense of vision. Do you, too, sometimes feel that the best way to describe what you see in nature is to remind the listener of a painting?

A monograph on the color blue

November 16, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

I could imagine someone writing a monograph on the color blue, from the dense waxy blue of the Pompeiian wall paintings to Chardin and further to Cézanne: what a biography!

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

We are still in the Louvre, with Rilke tracing the origins of Cézanne’s color.

OCTOBER 8, 1907 (PART 2)

Contemporaneously with Guardi and Tiepolo, a woman too was painting, a Venetian, who came to all the courts and whose name was among the most well known of her time: Rosalba Carriera.

<…>

Three portraits are in the Louvre. A young lady, her face raised up by the straight neck and then turned naively toward the viewer, and in front of her décolleté lace dress she holds a small clear-eyed capuchin monkey who is peering out from the lower edge of the half-length portrait as eagerly as she’s looking out on top, just a bit more indifferently.

He’s reaching out with one small perfidious black hand to draw her tender, distracted hand into the picture by one slender finger.

Rosalba Carriera. Young girl holding a monkey. 1721.

This is so full of one period that it is valid for all times. And it is lovely and lightly painted, but really painted. There’s also a blue cloak in the picture and one whole lilac-white gillyflower stem, which, strangely, takes the place of a breast ornament.

And I noticed that this blue is that special eighteenth-century blue that you can find everywhere, in La Tour,

Maurice Quentin de La Tour. Portrait of King Louis XV. 1748.

in Peronnet,

and which even in Chardin does not cease to be elegant, even though here, as the ribbon of his peculiar hood (in the self-portrait with the horn-rimmed pince-nez), it is used quite recklessly.

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin. Self-Portrait with Spectacles. 1771.

(I could imagine someone writing a monograph on the color blue, from the dense waxy blue of the Pompeiian wall paintings to Chardin and further to Cézanne: what a biography!)

For Cézanne’s very unique blue is descended from these, it comes from the eighteenth-century blue which Chardin stripped of its pretension and which now, in Cézanne, no longer carries any secondary significance.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

MONOGRAPH on THE COLOR BLUE

Heinrich Wiegand Petzet writes in his introduction to “Letters on Cézanne”:

In one of the letters, he speaks of the possibility of writing a monograph on the color blue, beginning with the pastels of Rosalba Carriera and the special blue of the eighteenth century, whereupon he mentions Cézanne’s “very unique blue.” In the course of the letters he produces a series of variations of this blue, formulations whose expressive power exceeds everything that has ever been said about this color.

Here are some of these formulations:

completely supportless blue
cold, too remotely blissful barely-blue
blue dove-gray
an ancient Egyptian shadow-blue
self-contained blue
listening blue
thunderstorm blue
bourgeois cotton blue
densely quilted blue, and finally:
full of revolt Blue, Blue, Blue.

He is writing this monograph on the color blue, in these very letters.

Isn’t it strange how one’s best work sometimes happens not as “work”, but just so, as the unfolding of life, without pretension?

Gradually stripping everything of pretension: the color blue, the apples, the work: this is the deepest motive of these letters. For Rilke, this is also the quintessence of the evolution of art, be it poetry or painting.

SEEING PRACTICE: THE COLOR BLUE

A lot of color nuances disappear in reproductions, but it is still possible to get a glimpse of the evolution of blue Rilke writes about.

But is it just the evolution of painting, or the evolution of our sense of vision?

Or of the color blue itself?

After all, color as we know it doesn’t exist without vision; it is a product of the brain.

The magic of painting is in its ability to create a space where the brain shakes off some of its habituated routines, and is able to perceive color differently, more richly, more intensely than in “real life”. And some of this can then spill over into our “normal” vision — that’s how art expands and cleanses our visual perception.

As you go through your day, notice the color blue as you see it in nature. Has you perception shifted in response to the paintings you have just seen?

All of reality is on his side

November 14, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

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.

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?

Face-to-face with van Gogh reproductions

November 9, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

And (I) had them today, and gained such joy and insight and strength from them.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke, on van Gogh reproductions

On October 1, 1907, Rilke met an acquaintance of his, Mathilde Vollmoeller, a German painter. She had just returned from Amsterdam with a portfolio of van Gogh reproductions, which she lent to Rilke for a few days.

In this letter, he describes the portfolio, and I did my best to include all the paintings he mentions. Some of them were easy to find. In other cases, many of van Gogh’s paintings would fit Rilke’s description, so I had to choose one or two to bring you as close as possible to re-living Rilke’s experience face-to-face with van Gogh’s reproductions.

I split this letter in two, to give you more time with the paintings.

OCTOBER 2, 1907 (PART 1)

I spent a good, quiet hour: under the protection and in the feeling of yesterday’s letter from you, drinking my last sip of tea, face-to-face with the van Gogh reproductions.

We hadn’t gone through the whole portfolio yesterday, and so I was permitted to take them home with me, and now I have them to myself for a few days. And had them today, and gained such joy and insight and strength from them.

These are plain, not especially sophisticated but very appealing, reproductions of forty works, twenty of them dating back to the time before van Gogh came to France. Paintings, drawings, and lithographs, especially paintings.

Blooming trees (as only Jacobsen could do them),

Vincent van Gogh. Orchard in blossom. 1889. Click to zoom in (on Van Gogh Museum site).

plains in which human figures are distributed and moved about far and wide; and it still goes farther back behind them into the sheet and gets all bright at its farthest reach, as if continuing beyond the limits of the page.

Vincent van Gogh. Tulip fields near the Hague. 1886. Click to zoom in (on Van Gogh Museum site.)

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: COLORS and Words

How implicitly obvious it is for Rilke that there is fundamentally no difference between art forms, between language and color…

Van Gogh does blossoming trees as only Jacobsen could do them (Jens Peter Jacobsen was a Danish poet and novelist, whom Rilke called him his “tutelary spirit” (Back to text)). Be it paints or words, they are but materials for an artist to re-enact reality.

In a sense, what Rilke is gradually learning in these letters is to do landscapes as only Cézanne could do them.

SEEING PRACTICE: VAN GOGH’S indescribable reality

A click on any (or all) of reproductions will bring you to the high-resolution versions on Van Gogh Museum website. You can then zoom in on the blossoms to see just how exactly they are done out of paint (a luxury Rilke couldn’t even dream about).

The more I look at them, the more I appreciate just how alchemy-like painting really is.