The right eyes: Rilke on painting

Rilke on painting

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Solitude

Touchingly tentative portraits of Madame Cézanne

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… they plant themselves for a moment, without looking, next to one of those touchingly tentative portraits of Madame Cézanne, so as to exploit the hideousness of this painting for a comparison which they believe is so favorable to themselves.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 16, 1907 (Part 1)

Human beings, how they play with everything.

How blindly they misuse what has never been looked at, never experienced, distract themselves by displacing all that has been immeasurably gathered together <…>

Paul Cezanne. Portrait of Madame Cezanne. 1985.

You have only to see the people going through the two rooms, say on a Sunday: amused, ironically irritated, annoyed, indignant. And when they finally arrive at some concluding remark, there they stand, these Monsieurs, in the middle of this world, affecting a note of pathetic despair, and you hear them saying: il n’y a absolument rien, rien, rien.

Paul Cezanne. Madame Cezanne with a yellow-armchair. 1890

And the women, how beautiful they appear to themselves as they pass by; they recall that just a little while ago they saw their reflections in the glass doors as they stepped in, with complete satisfaction, and now, with their mirror image in mind, they plant themselves for a moment, without looking, next to one of those touchingly tentative portraits of Madame Cézanne, so as to exploit the hideousness of this painting for a comparison which they believe is so favorable to themselves.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Paul Cezanne. Portrait of Madame Cezanne. 1890.

SOLITUDE

The further one goes along one’s own path, living the experience all the way to the end, the more solitary the journey.

This letter touches two aspects of the artist’s solitude.

One is obvious: the general public’s inability to see what has been shown, to hear what has been said, if it is too radically new, to far removed from their habituated experiences.

The other is hardly mentioned, but it is there nonetheless. It is invoked by Rilke’s mention of the portraits of Mme Cézanne.

SEEING PRACTICE: Portraits of Hortense Fiquet-Cézanne

Cézanne met his future wife, Hortense Fiquet (1850– 1922) in Paris in 1869 (he was thirty years old at the time). Their son, Paul, was born in 1872, but Cézanne had to keep the relationship secret for a long time for fear of being disowned by his father. They married (and Paul was legitimized) only in 1886.

Alex Danchev writes in a note to The Letters of Paul Cézanne:

It is widely believed that she and Cézanne did not have much in common, apart from their son, and that soon enough she came to mean rather little to him.

Against that prejudiced account should be set at least twenty-four portraits, painted over a period of twenty years, long after they had ceased to live together all the time.

Cézanne studied his wife more intently and more durably than he did anyone else, except perhaps himself, to extraordinary effect.

My own experience of these portraits has changed dramatically over time.

As a young girl, all I saw in them was radical objectification. They were painted, I thought, as though there were no interpersonal relationship there, as though he didn’t see a human being in her at all.

But it is not at all the kind of objectification usually meant in the context of gender relationships. He approaches and sees her in the same way he did his mountain, Mont Sainte-Victoire, and as Rilke has reportedly once remarked, “Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.”

While working on this project, I found a very early portrait of Hortense, which stands quite apart from the rest.

Paul Cezanne. Hortense breast-feeding Paul. 1872.

In Rilke’s words, this early portrait says: I love her. If the ladies in the Salon (or me as a young girl) saw this, we would probably have been more touched, more impressed.

But the mature ones only say: HERE SHE IS.

Let me quote from an earlier letter here again, because it is so relevant here:

They’d paint: I love this here; instead of painting: here it is.

In which case everyone must see for himself whether or not I loved it. This is not shown at all, and some would even insist that it has nothing to do with love.

The love is so thoroughly used up in the action of making that there is no residue. It may be that this using up of love in anonymous work, which produces such pure things, was never achieved as completely as in the work of this old man.

 

 

 

Works of art are always the result of one’s having been in danger

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… After all, works of art are always the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Nowadays, when more than a century has passed after this letter was written, and “uniqueness” and “self-expression” turned into buzz-words, it may be too easy to assume that everyone now knows what Rilke is talking about, that it is almost “common sense”, “old news”.

So let me mention, right now, a key word which doesn’t appear in the letter straightaway: MADNESS.

To see and experience what nobody else sees and experiences: isn’t it a symptom of madness? But this is also the quintessence of true art.

JUNE 24, 1907

… After all, works of art are always the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.

The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity.

Therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it,—: that it is his epitome; the knot in the rosary at which his life says a prayer, the ever-returning proof to himself of his unity and genuineness, which presents itself only to him while appearing anonymous to the outside, nameless, as mere necessity, as reality, as existence—

So surely we have no choice but to test and try ourselves against the utmost, but probably we are also constrained to keep silence regarding it, to avoid sharing it, parting with it in communication before it has entered the work of art:

Vincent Van Gogh. Landscape from Saint-Rémy. 1889. Click to zoom in (on Google Cultural Institute)

for the utmost represents nothing other than that singularity in us which no one would or even should understand, and which must enter into the work as such, as our personal madness, so to speak, in order to find its justification in the work and show the law in it, like an inborn design that is invisible until it emerges in the transparency of the artistic.

—Nevertheless there are two liberties of communication, and these seem to me to be the utmost possible ones: the one that occurs face-to-face with the accomplished thing, and the one that takes place within actual daily life, in showing one another what one has become through one’s work and thereby supporting and helping and (in the humble sense of the word) admiring one another.

Vincent Van Gogh. Olive trees. 1889. Click to zoom in (on Google Cultural Institute)

But in either case one must show results, and it is not lack of trust or withdrawal or rejection if one doesn’t present to another the tools of one’s progress, which have so much about them that is confusing and tortuous, and whose only value lies in the personal use one makes of them.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: SOLITUDE. SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE

Two interrelated themes of the book begin in this letter: solitude as a quintessential ingredient of art, and  the paradoxical interplay between “subjective” and “objective”.

One has to go deep inside oneself, to a deeply personal place — to find the unique point of connection with reality, with existence, with the nameless objective, the utmost.

And this can only happen in solitude, in complete aloneness.

SEEING PRACTICE: van Gogh’s Indescribable reality

The artist Rilke is thinking about in this letter is Vincent van Gogh, and his disastrous attempt to share life and work with Paul Gauguin (he mentions this episode later in the letter).

The singularity of van Gogh’s vision is so utterly unique, so unfathomably deep, that that piece of utmost reality he has reached to and reenacted in his paintings — this piece is not yet integrated into the realm of shared experience. Not fully, not really.

There is still work for us all — to fully open ourselves to this as yet indescribable expansion of human vision he brought to this world.

In this letter, Rilke doesn’t mention any individual paintings, so I have chosen these two landscapes myself. Click either of them to zoom in and see how they emerge out of flurries of colors: a visual experience of objective reality lived through all the way to the end.

 

 

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.