Monograph on the color blue

Full of mutual understanding

December 23, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

… 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).

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.

…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.

Unfinished, exaggerated designs of vastness

November 23, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

A large fan-shaped poplar was leafing playfully in front of this completely supportless blue, in front of the unfinished, exaggerated designs of a vastness which the good Lord holds out before him without any knowledge of perspective.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 11, 1907

… it was wonderful to come to the quais today, spacious, wafting, cool. In the east behind Notre-Dame and Saint-Germain l‘Auxerrois all of the last, gray, half-discarded days had bunched together, and before me, over the Tuileries, toward the Arc de l’Étoile, lay something open, bright, weightless, as if this were a place leading all the way out of the world.

Paul Cezanne. View of L’estaque and Chateaux d’If. 1885.

A large fan-shaped poplar was leafing playfully in front of this completely supportless blue, in front of the unfinished, exaggerated designs of a vastness which the good Lord holds out before him without any knowledge of perspective.

Paul Cezanne. Bottom of the ravine. 1879. Click the image to zoom in on Google Cultural Institute.

LANDSCAPE OF WORDS

No paintings are mentioned in this letter, but do you notice how Rilke’s own landscapes are changing in response to his encounter with paintings? I have included some to share with you my own perception of this change…

SEEING PRACTICE: SKY

What is the sky? A blue horizontal plane above us? Or a backdrop, a vertical plane against which we see whatever it is we see, without any knowledge of perspective? How do you think about the sky? How do you see it?

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

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?