The right eyes: Rilke on painting

Rilke on painting

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Oneness and separation

In painting you can suddenly come upon something so huge that no one can deal with it

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Zola had understood nothing; it was Balzac who had foreseen or forefelt that in painting you can suddenly come upon something so huge that no one can deal with it.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 9, 1907 (Part 3)

He became well known in Paris, and gradually his fame grew.

But he had nothing but mistrust for any progress that wasn’t of his own making (that others had made, let alone how); he remembered only too well how thoroughly Zola (a fellow Provençal, like himself, and a close acquaintance since early childhood) had misinterpreted his fate and his aspirations in L’Oeuvre.

From then on, any kind of scribbling was out: “Travailler sans le souci de personne et devenir fort—” he once shouted at a visitor.

But when the latter, in the middle of a meal, described the novella about the Chef d’Oeuvre inconnu (I told you about it once), where Balzac, with unbelievable foresight of future developments, invented a painter named Frenhofer who is destroyed by the discovery that there really are no contours but only oscillating transitions—destroyed, that is, by an impossible problem——,

Paul Cezanne. On the bank of a river. 1904-1905. Click to zoom in (on Google Cultural Institute).

the old man, hearing this, stands up, despite Madame Brémond, who surely did not appreciate this kind of irregularity, and, voiceless with agitation, points his finger, clearly, again and again, at himself, himself, himself, painful though that may have been.

Zola had understood nothing; it was Balzac who had foreseen or forefelt that in painting you can suddenly come upon something so huge that no one can deal with it.

 Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Rilke recounts an episode from Émile Bernard’s ‘Memories of Paul Cézanne’ (1907):

one evening, when I spoke to him of “Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu” and Frenhofer, the hero of Balzac’s tragedy, he got up from the table, stood before me and, striking his chest with his index finger, confessed wordlessly by this repeated gesture that he was the very character in the novel. He was so moved that his eyes filled with tears. One of his predecessors, who had a prophetic soul, had understood him. (Translated by Alex Danchev, in The Letters of Paul Cézanne).

Even though Bernard doesn’t say so explicitly, Rilke seems to have inferred that Cézanne hadn’t read the novel. Nothing could be further from truth. Cézanne was a well-educated and well-read man. Alex Danchev writes in his introduction to “The Letters”:

His bedside reading was Balzac: a well-thumbed copy of the “Études philosophiques”, including “Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu”, another source of self-projection.

SEEING PRACTICE: ONENESS AND SEPARATION

The painting I added to this letter is one of those where Cézanne went through the experience of contour-less sensations of color “all the way to the end”. No contours, only “oscillating transitions”, so that the reality itself seems to dissolve just as we are beginning to see it as it is.

A mutual struggle between two procedures

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I think there was a conflict, a mutual struggle between the two procedures of, first, looking and confidently perceiving, and then of appropriating and making personal use of what has been perceived.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Cézanne created his own process of building up color in paintings from life. It was unlike anything the world of painting had seen before.

We know this process from his own letters, and from observations of fellow painters, and, most significantly, from his unfinished works.

To complement Rilke’s description, I have included three paintings of the same motive, which show three different stages of his process.

October 9, 1907 (Part 2)

And all the while <…> he exacerbated the difficulty of his work in the most willful manner. While painting a landscape or a still life, he would conscientiously persevere in front of the subject, but approach it only by very complicated detours.

Beginning with the darkest tones, he would cover their depth with a layer of color that led a little beyond them, and keep going, expanding outward from color to color, until gradually he reached another, contrasting pictorial element, where, beginning at a new center, he would proceed in a similar way.

Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire. 1887.

I think there was a conflict, a mutual struggle between the two procedures of, first, looking and confidently perceiving, and then of appropriating and making personal use of what has been perceived;

Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire. 1890.

that the two, perhaps as a result of becoming conscious, would immediately start opposing each other, talking out loud, as it were, and go on perpetually interrupting and contradicting each other.

Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire. 1895.

And the old man endured their discord, ran back and forth in his studio, which was badly lit because the builder had not found it necessary to pay attention to this strange old bird whom the people of Aix had agreed not to take seriously.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

INTERCOURSE OF COLORS. CONSCIOUS AWARENESS

At this point, Rilke doesn’t really understand the whys and wherefores of Cézanne’s process, but this will change in a few days.

His use of the word “willful” is particularly jarring to my ear, because there is simply no other way to achieve Cézanne’s realization of color. There is nothing willful, nothing random about this process.

Rilke’s note about the mutual struggle of two procedures touches a theme which he returns to, time and again: the artist’s CONSCIOUS AWARENESS of their own process and insights.

SEEING PRACTICE: ONENESS AND SEPARATION

Cézanne wrote to Émile Bernard on October 23, 1905:

So, old as I am, around seventy, the color sensations that create light are the cause of abstractions that do not allow me to cover my canvas, nor to pursue the delimitation of objects when their points of contact are subtle, delicate; the result of which is that my image or painting is incomplete.

On the other hand, the planes fall on top of one another, from which comes the neo-Impressionism that outlines [everything] in black, a defect that must be resisted with all one’s might. But consulting nature gives us the means of achieving this goal.

In the three paintings I attached to this letter, one can see this struggle between overlapping “color sensations” and black contours trying to hold everything together, or rather to keep objects apart.

I don’t see it as a struggle between perception and “appropriation”, as Rilke describes it. Rather, it is a struggle between two modes of perception, one that sees separate objects, and one that sees only unified vibrations of color.