The right eyes: Rilke on painting

Rilke on painting

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Early work

Preoccupied with black

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… black is treated purely as a color, not as its opposite, and is recognized again as a color among colors everywhere

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

The Salon has closed, and Rilke has left Paris for Prague, but this encounter with Cézanne isn’t over yet.

NOVEMBER 4, 1907 (Part 1)

… will you believe that I came to Prague to see Cézannes? … Outside in the Manes-Pavilion, where the Rodin exhibit used to be, there was (as I fortunately learned just in time) an exhibition of modern pictures. The best and most remarkable: Monticelli and Monet well represented, Pissarro adequately; 3 things by Daumier. And 4 Cézannes. (Also van Gogh, Gauguin, Émile Bernard: each with several pieces.)

But Cézanne: a large portrait, a seated man (M. Valabrègue) with lots of black on a lead-black ground. His face, and his fists resting on his lap below, their skin tones intensified all the way to orange, are strongly and unequivocally put there.

Paul Cezanne. Portrait of Anthony Valabregue. 1866.

A still life, equally preoccupied with black; on a smoothly black table a long loaf of white bread in natural yellow, a white cloth, a thick-walled wine glass on a stem, two eggs, two onions, a tin milk container, and, obliquely resting against the loaf, a black knife.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with bread and eggs. 1865

And here, even more than in the portrait, black is treated purely as a color, not as its opposite, and is recognized again as a color among colors everywhere: in the cloth, over whose white it is spread, inside the glass, muting the white of the eggs and weighting the yellow of the onions to old gold.

(Just as, without having quite seen this yellow yet, I surmised that there must have been black with it.)

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Intercourse of Colors. Color Black. Reality

Isn’t it strange and wonderful, how the unfolding of life brings us exactly what we need (or at least it does if we pay attention)?

Not just more of Cézanne, but the miraculous continuation of the theme which both opens and closes his encounter with Cézanne in Paris: the color black.

And so, as this sequence of letters draws to its close, I ask you once again to pay attention to this mysterious color, which is both a color and the absence of it, depending on how we look at it.

There is a hidden, not fully open, parallel, between seeing black as color and “realizing that even something horrible, something that seems no more than disgusting, is, and is valid, along with everything else that is”.

Black and white behave perfectly colorlike next to the other colors

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black and white <…> behave perfectly colorlike next to the other colors, their equal in every way, as if long acclimatized.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 24, 1907 (Part 4)

The use of white as a color was natural to him from the start: together with black, it defined the two limits of his wide-open palette,

Paul Cezanne. The black marble clock. C. 1870.

and in the very beautiful ensemble of a black stone mantelpiece with a pendulum clock, black and white (the latter in a cloth that covers part of the mantel and hangs over its edge) behave perfectly colorlike next to the other colors, their equal in every way, as if long acclimatized.

(Differently than in Manet, whose black has the effect of a light being switched off and yet still stands opposed to the other colors as if coming from some other place.)

Edouard Manet. The lemon. 1880.

Brightly confronting each other on the white cloth are a coffee cup with a heavy dark-blue stripe on the edge, a fresh, ripe lemon, a cut crystal chalice with a sharply scalloped edge, and, way over on the left, a large, baroque triton shell—eccentric and singular in appearance, with its smooth, red orifice facing the front.

Paul Cezanne. The black marble clock. C. 1870.

Its inward carmine bulging out into brightness provokes the wall behind it to a kind of thunderstorm blue, which is then repeated, more deeply and spaciously, by the adjoining gold-framed mantelpiece mirror;

here, in the mirror image, it again meets with a contradiction: the milky rose of a glass vase which, standing on the black pendulum clock, asserts its contrast twice (first in reality, then, a little more yieldingly, in reflection).

Space and mirror-space are definitively indicated and distinguished—musically, as it were—by this double stroke; the picture contains them the way a basket contains fruit and leaves: as if all this were just as easy to grasp and to give.

But there’s still some other object on the bare mantelpiece, pushed up against the white cloth: I’d like to go back to the picture to see what it was.

But the Salon no longer exists; in a few days it will be replaced by an exhibition of automobiles which will stand there, long and dumb, each one with its own idée fixe of velocity.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Presence. Intercourse of colors

As you read this portrait-in-words of a still life, don’t you find it hard to believe that it is written completely from memory?

Earlier, Rilke wrote about the greatness of Cézanne’s watching. In these descriptions from memory, we see his own great watching: the sheer quality of presence and attention he brought to this encounter with Cézanne.

I had to re-read the letter, following the flow of words around the picture with more focused attention, to even find that single object he forgot… Did you?