Letters on Cézanne

by Rainer Maria Rilke, Joel Agee (Translator)

Rilke's prayerful responses to the french master's beseeching art

For a long time nothing, and then suddenly one has the right eyes.

Virtually every day in the fall of 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke returned to a Paris gallery to view a Cezanne exhibition. Nearly as frequently, he wrote dense and joyful letters to his wife, Clara Westhoff, expressing his dismay before the paintings and his ensuing revelations about art and life.

Rilke was knowledgeable about art and had even published monographs, including a famous study of Rodin that inspired his New Poems . But Cezanne's impact on him could not be conveyed in a traditional essay. Rilke's sense of kinship with Cezanne provides a powerful and prescient undercurrent in these letters -- passages from them appear verbatim in Rilke's great modernist novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge . Letters on Cezanne is a collection of meaningfully private responses to a radically new art.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Poetry, Classics, Biography, Art History, Essays

103 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1907

About the author

A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (1905) and The Duino Elegies (1923).

People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.

His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.

His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge .

He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.

Reviews

[Kalliope · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rilke wrote these letters to his wife the sculptor Clara Westhoff during the period when he lived in Paris (1902 to 1910). He had been commissioned to write a monograph on Rodin and also worked for him as a secretary for a few months. During this period he also wrote his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge




The collection has about thirty letters written from June until November 1907 but the content of Clara’s letters is only hinted in this one sided conversation.


Clara Westhoff by Paula Modersohn-Becker


He wrote in blue paper.

The letters record a phase in Rilke’s aesthetic development, revealing strikingly how the visual arts were the foundation for the way he conceived his art and himself as an artist. Strongly influenced by Rodin, who had become a sort of spiritual father, he was also struck by a collection of reproductions of Van Gogh that a friend painter, the German Mathilde Vollmoeller, had brought from Holland. This incident is a reminder to us, pampered by the almost overwhelming availability of art reproductions, of how difficult it was for the cultural community of that time to access art which was not physically available.

And then in the fall, the fifth edition of the Salon d’Automne, in the Grand Palais, opened. And it is precisely because of the still limited access of reproductions that these events had such a huge bearing on the fashioning of the various avant-garde movements. People travelled expressly for them. And so Rilke met Hofmannsthal, and the ubiquitous Count Kessler, amongst others in the rooms of this Salon.






This edition of the Salon had, amongst the works by other artists, a retrospective of Cézanne’s work. He had passed away exactly one year before.

When Rilke visited Cézanne’s paintings, he was astounded.

He had first seen some of his work in a private gallery in Berlin in 1900, and he had already been struck by its idiosyncrasies. But now he could spend time, long time, contemplating a fair array of his paintings. He kept going back to the Salon. He writes how in the other rooms he prefers to observe the people visiting, but than only in the presence of Cézanne’s canvases does he forget himself, and others.

And so he writes about Cézanne to Clara while Van Gogh is somewhat relegated. He even begins to doubt his already formed opinions on Rodin. The first volume of the monograph had already been published but he fears his aesthetic leanings have departed since. He justifies this by stressing the temporality of his reactions. What he had written were authentic but ephemeral impressions.

If his Notebooks seems the account of a flâneur through his memories, these letters are those of a flâneur through the corridors of aesthetics in the search for his own creativiy. Foremost is his realization that the drive to create must absolutely dominate the self and do so not with the force of discipline but with joy (Freude). He then analyses the importance of colour for the painter, the material out of which he constructs his visions. In this Rilke shows an acute sensitivity to the various hues and their materiality with one letter developing, brilliantly, the fascination of blue.

Blue like the paper of his letters.





In Cézanne, Rilke recognizes that he travelled so deep into that which he was depicting that he would then be able to recreate a perception, “la réalisation” (and Rilke says he is using Cézanne’s expression), and produce with his materials, colours, the tangible beauty in those depicted things. The apples thus become inedible and the landscapes do not have a story and become like still lives, or the still lives have a panoramic dimension.




As for the portraits, he detects that a similar balancing of colours takes place between the red armchair, the stripes and the figure so that in this hither and back of mutual and manifold influence, the interior of the picture vibrates, rises and falls back into itself, and does not have a single moving part In diesem Hin und Wieder von gegenseitigem vielartigen Einfluss schwingt das Bildinnere, steigt und fällt in sich selbst zurück und hat nicht eine stehende Stelle.






But in all this, Rilke was seeking his own art. In the letters he is trying to formulate his quest and his findings. Colours are for the painters; for the writer are the memories. And one of these letters actually becomes an episode of his alter-ego Malte Laurids Brigge, even if Rilke says that Brigge failed where Cézanne and Baudelaire had not. An artist has to be able to represent what exists, and again the evocation of Baudelaire’s La Charogne, which as Rilke notes Cézanne knew by heart, is included in his novel.


Surprised I was to recognize some passages in these letters. The fact that fragments from the epistles were recycled in his single novel becomes a clue to Rilke’s own writing process and attests the fragmentary nature of his compositions. No wonder that poetry offered him a more attuned genre than sequential fiction. His writing wanted, like Cézanne’s landscapes, to be devoid of narrative.

Rilke’s knowledge of the more personal aspects of Cézanne were based on an article, “Souvenirs de Cézanne” that Emile Bernard had just published in the Mercure de France, but his appreciation of what Cézanne was trying to do, as revealed in these letters, continues to be a rich source of inspiration for lovers of Cézanne.


His love for Cézanne has made me like Rilke more.

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the Summer and Fall of 1907, Rilke traveled to Paris. He spent many days rapt before the paintings of Cézanne in the Salon d'Autome, which was holding a memorial exhibition of the painter's work. Rilke captured his reactions and developing thoughts about art and artists in a series of letters to his wife, Clara. This volume contains translated excerpts from the letters, which transport the reader to Rilke's side.

Although the letters are excerpted (one reason why I dropped the rating down one star), each contains treasures, insights, beautiful evocations of the paintings Rilke has viewed, which serve as a catalyst for his developing thoughts of the nature of art. Rilke views himself as just learning to look at paintings and understand them, as he was not a painter himself. However, the qualities he values in the work of Cézanne (and of Van Gogh, whose work he viewed in a portfolio lent to him by a friend during his stay) easily translate into his work as a poet and a writer.


Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (1904-1906)

And, as would be expected from Rilke, the writing is brilliant throughout: vivid, imaginative, beautiful, real. His descriptions of individual paintings draw the reader by his side as he pages through a portfolio of Van Gogh's work in his rented rooms:

"His self-portrait in the portfolio looks needy and tormented, almost desperate, but not devastated: the way a dog looks when it’s in a bad way. He holds out his face and you take note of the fact: he’s in a bad way, day and night. But in his paintings (the arbre fleuri) poverty has already become rich: a great splendor from within. And that’s how he sees everything: as a poor man; just compare his parks. These too are expressed with such quietness and simplicity, as if for poor people, so they can understand; without going into the extravagance that’s in these trees; as if to do that would already be taking sides. He isn’t on anyone’s side, isn’t on the side of the parks, and his love for all these things is directed at the nameless, and that’s why he himself concealed it. He does not show it, he has it. And quickly takes it out of himself and into the work, into the innermost and incessant part of the work: quickly: and no one has seen it! That’s how one feels his presence in these forty pages...." (36)


Van Gogh, Self Portrait (1887)

Or standing next to him before a Cézanne still life in the Salon d'Autome:

"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. 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." (44)


Cézanne, Still Life (1893-1894)

"Chardin was the intermediary in other respects, too; his fruits are no longer thinking of a gala dinner, they’re scattered about on kitchen tables and don’t care whether they are eaten beautifully or not. In Cézanne they cease to be edible altogether, that’s how thing-like and real they become, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness." (47)

All his individual observations and reflections lead him to develop a deeper appreciation for the role of the artist:

"Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition." (81)

There is much to recommend in this volume for readers who are engaged by aesthetics, who love Cézanne's artwork and want to see how it was appreciated and perceived so soon after his death, or who want to get lost in Rilke's beautiful prose. There is inspiration on every page.

My favorite passage, though, has nothing to do with Cézanne at all. It conveys Rilke's responses to three springs of heather that Clara sent him in a previous letter:

"… Never have I been so touched and almost moved by the sight of heather as the other day, when I found these three branches in your dear letter. Since then they have been lying in my Book of Images, penetrating it with their strong and serious smell, which is really just the fragrance of autumn earth. But how glorious it is, this fragrance. At no other time, it seems to me, does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more than honeysweet where you feel it is close to touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost, and yet again wind; tar and turpentine and Ceylon tea. Serious and lowly like the smell of a begging monk and yet again hearty and resinous like precious incense. And the way they look: like embroidery, splendid; like three cypresses woven into a Persian rug with violet silk (a violet of such vehement moistness, as if it were the complementary color of the sun). You should see this. I don’t believe these little twigs could have been as beautiful when you sent them: otherwise you would have expressed some astonishment about them. Right now one of them happens to be lying on dark-blue velvet in an old pen-and-pencil box. It’s like a firework: well, no, it’s really like a Persian rug. Are all these millions of little branches really so wonderfully wrought? Just look at the radiance of this green which contains a little gold, and the sandalwood warmth of the brown in the little stems, and that fissure with its new, fresh, inner barely-green. —Ah, I’ve been admiring the splendor of these little fragments for days and am truly ashamed that I was not happy when I was permitted to walk about in a superabundance of these." (27)

Rilke writes of the heather as though he were describing a painting in a gallery: his focus on the depth of color, his being transported by the reality of the object to a different place and time, his new appreciation for a place dear to him, but too easily taken for granted.


Cézanne, Bords d'une rivière (Riverbanks) (1904-1905)

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

...which so incorruptibly reduced a reality to its color content that it resumed a new existence in a beyond of color, without any previous memories.

I love reading poets on painters because the need to establish a correspondance des arts between word and color always calls forth a poet's deepest powers of expression and precision (and an aesthetic mysticism clings to considerations of the painterly confronation with creation, with the spirituality of seeing, as in the aforequoted credo). Even in translation, the texture of these letters is rich, chewy, dense with associative imagery. And since they are familiar letters to his wife, written from Paris during the summer and fall of 1907, during whch Rilke spent many days rapt in the two Cezanne rooms of the Salon d'Autome, there's flanerie, Parisian perceptions, of the city's weather and parks and cafes and boulevards, some of which Rilke would include almost verbatim in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. This edition is beautifully designed and printed: Rilke's letters are set spaciously, with plenty of room between the lines and at the margins, in Walbaum, the elegant typeface Knopf uses for Anthony Hecht and John Hollander...a slim sunny book.

[Narjes Dorzade · Rating 3 out of 5]

اما حالا باران،باران: همه‌جا ریز و پر صدا، مثلِ بارشش در ییلاق، بی هیچ صدای دیگری در میانه.لبه گرد دیوار صومعه پر است از خزه و نقطه‌های سبزِ خالص

[Ehsan · Rating 5 out of 5]

«شاید دارم اغراق می‌کنم _اما هرچه می‌دیدم سزان بود.»
آن آبی‌ی بی‌اندازه یگانه‌ی سزان.

[Leland · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful little book which, despite its epistolary nature, reads like a manifesto on post Impressionism. Every page contains a poetic gem. A must read for artists, writers, and those who take pleasure in act of seeing.

[Susan Vreeland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not an art history of Cezanne by a poet, this is rather an intimate account of Rilke's encounter with Cezanne through the paintings in an exhibition the year after the painter died. It's private, (the letters are to his wife), sometimes rhapsodic, sometimes stumbling, always earnest. I respect Rilke and Cezanne more after reading this attempt to grasp the painter's vast and deep aspirations. This helped me tremendously in writing scenes in LISETTE'S LIST (my work-in-progress) in which an ordinary man from Provence tries to understand his countryman and his new, bold art.

I'm so moved by Rilke's understatement, "I know a few things [about Cezanne] from his last years when he was old and shabby and children followed him every day on his way to his studio, throwing stones at him as if at a stray dog. But inside, way inside, he was marvelously beautiful." From this passage, I wrote a short story in LIFE STUDIES, called "Of These Stones," with the point of view of one of the boys who threw those stones.

Rilke's book means a lot to me.

[مهسا · Rating 4 out of 5]

Je me suis juré de mourir en peignant

قسم می‌خورم تا روزی که بمیرم به نقاشی ادامه دهم. درست مثل تصویری قدیمی از رقص مرگ، که نشان می‌دهد چگونه مرگ از پشت دستانش را گرفته، آخرین ضربهٔ قلم‌موی خود را می‌زند، در رعشهٔ لذت؛ سایهٔ او چندی روی پالت باقی می‌ماند، و او برای انتخاب رنگ دلخواهش از روی پالتی که رنگ‌هایش به شکلی گرد مرتب شده‌اند وقت دارد؛ به محض آنکه رنگ روی قلم می‌آید او نزدیک می‌شود و نقاشی می‌کند... همه همین؛ او دستش را بالا برد و آخرین ضربه را زد. تنها ضربه‌ای که می‌توانست

[Anna Vincent · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read excerpts of this eight years ago; I read the whole book four years ago, and I since revisit it whenever I can. It’s Rilke’s writings to his wife, Clara Rilke.

He has a meticulously observant and poetic style, a romance, that’s unparalleled.

Below I analyze two of my favorite letters, with a focus on style.

PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE,
SEPTEMBER 13, 1907 (FRIDAY)

…Never have I been so touched and almost moved by the sight of heather as the other day, when I found these three branches in your dear letter. Since then they have been lying in my Book of Images, penetrating it with their strong and serious smell(1), which is really just the fragrance of autumn earth. But how glorious it is, this fragrance. At no other time, it seems to me, does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste(2), and more than honeysweet where you feel it is close to touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost(3), and yet again wind; tar and turpentine and Ceylon tea. Serious and lowly like the smell of a begging monk and yet again hearty and resinous like precious incense. And the way they look: like embroidery, splendid; like three cypresses woven into a Persian rug with violet silk (a violet of such vehement moistness, as if it were the complementary color of the sun)(4). You should see this. I don’t believe these little twigs could have been so beautiful when you sent them; otherwise you would have expressed so astonishment about them(5). Right now one of them happens to be lying on the dark-blue velvet in an old pen-and-pencil box. It’s like a firework: well no, it’s really like a Persian rug. Are all these millions of little branches really so wonderfully wrought? Just look(6) at the radiance of this green which contains a little gold, and the sandalwood warmth of the brown in the little stems, and that fissure with its new, fresh, inner barely-green. –Ah, I’ve been admiring the splendor of these little fragments for days and am truly ashamed that I was not happy when I was permitted to walk about in a superabundance of these. One lives so badly, because one always comes into the present unfinished, unable, distracted(7). I cannot think back on any time of my life without such reproaches and worse. I believe that the only time I lived without loss were the ten days after Ruth’s birth [his daughter], when I found reality as indescribable, down to the smallest details, as it surely always is. –But presumably I would not be so receptive to the splendor of these little pieces of heather stemming from the extravagance of the northern year if I hadn’t just gotten over an urban summer(8). Perhaps, then, it wasn’t completely in vain that I lived through the sort of cubicled summer where you’re lodged as if in the smallest of those boxes that fit one into the other, twenty times. And you’re sitting in the last one, crouching. Good God: how I labored last year; oceans, parks, woods, forest meadows: my longing for these is indescribably sometimes. Those vaporous mornings(9) and evenings are already starting, where the sun is merely the place where the sun used to be, and where in the yards all the summer flowers, the dahlias and the tall gladiolas and the long rows of geraniums shout the contradiction of their red into the mist. This makes me sad. It brings up desolate memoirs, one doesn’t know why: as if the music of the urban summer were ending in dissonance, in a mutiny of all its notes; perhaps just because one has already once before taken all this so deeply into oneself and read its meanings and made it part of oneself, without ever actually making it.
Only this… for Sunday…
(p. 9-11)

(1) This description lends to what you do when you smell something overpowering, you’re taken back by it. “Serious” also draws the reader’s attention more, as the word serious, written amongst a flow of more peaceful words, almost says to the reader “this is serious now, pay attention.”
(2) Here he’s describing the extreme of the smell, comparing it to the sea while making you think of the sea. He’s adding another sense too—taste. I love this writing.
(3) Here he references the earth again, and grave makes us think of dirt but also again of something serious. Rilke was a clever writer.
(4) He’s combining color and tactile sense now, with violet and moistness. With “a complimentary color of the sun” we now have two colors in mind—violet and yellow—and from the word sun the idea again of an overpowering intensity. This is how Rilke feels while writing this. But, like the sun, his intensity is not always shining on this topic, as we see soon when he says how he didn’t notice or appreciate the heather before.
(5) This is a little comical to me, as if he stands back for a moment and recognizes his own intensity, sort of laughs at it, then is re-convinced that it’s warranted, and says “astonishment.”
(6) Now he’s gotten so carried away he talks as if she’s there with him.
(7) Now this is serious. He suddenly makes a poignant psychological-philosophical observation. In the previous sentence he says he feels ashamed. Knowing these little pieces of heather to their depths has made him emotional, which speaks to their beauty and their and his intensity.
(8) I like northern year and urban summer.
(9) Vaporous mornings I like as well. These are descriptors before the main word but they work well.

PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE,
ON SUNDAY [SEPTEMBER 29, 1907]

…What you experienced with the Portuguese grape(1) is something I know so well: I am feeling it simultaneously in two pomegranates I recently bought from Potin; how glorious(2) they are in the massive heaviness(3), with the curved ornament of the pistil still on the top(4); princely in their golden skins(5) with the red undercoat showing through, strong and genuine, like the leather of old Cordovan tapestries(6). I have not yet tried to open them; they probably aren’t ripe yet. When they are, I believe they easily burst of their own fullness(7) and have slits with purple linings, like noblemen in grand apparel(8).—Looking at them, I too felt rising up within me the desire and presentiment of things foreign and southerly, and the lure of long voyages(9). But then, how much all of that is already within one, and how much more so when closing one’s eyes tightly; I felt it again when I wrote the Corrida, which I had never seen: how I knew and how I saw it all! … (p. 13)

(1) This is such an interesting start to me. She is like him then, it implies, in that they both become sensually enamored by nature and then describe it to one another. I like his word “experienced,” rather than observed or witnessed or recalled; it’s more in depth and allows for a full sensory “experience.”
(2) He simply says “glorious” and his voice is to be trusted. He balances that, though, with very detailed descriptions.
(3) I like “massive heaviness.” A double description. I can feel the weight of a pomegranate in each hand, weighing my hands down like to metal weight balls. Massive heaviness is when you lift something and its heavier than expected, it takes you by surprise.
(4) Ornament is another word in the category of princely and noblemen. He ties everything about the fruit into a comparison of a nobleman.
(5) Princely, golden…
(6) Cordovan is a heavier word, and noble-sounding, and it works well here. Leather I like too; they’re skins, just as the fruit skins are.
(7) These pomegranates can’t sustain their own intensity, he’s saying. And, by metaphor, the princes are so full of themselves they burst open. This is comical.
(8) He could have chosen other words instead of grand and apparel, but these words have a richness to them. Not merely clothes, but grand apparel.
(9) I do not understand his point here—how does this tie in? I do like the idea that he’s gotten so carried away, lost in his senses, that he’s put himself in a dreamlike state and started to imagine long voyages simply out of wanderlust.

[Camille · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rilke, gepassioneerd en met duidelijke mening, beschrijft werken, schotelt ze je voor, doet je op details letten en suggereert een nieuwe benadering ze te bekijken. Wat me nieuwe ideeën over schilderkunst bracht, dingen waar ik nog niet bij stilstond, bijvoorbeeld de diepere focus op kleuren. Er worden veel namen genoemd, die ergens misschien een belletje doen rinkelen, maar vaak toch onbekend zijn, dat maakt het lezen wel onzekerder. En damn al die lange zinnen, de Duitse taal kent zijn komma’s.
Het is een aangename vorm om te lezen, het was voor mij een boekje om nu en dan eens vast te nemen en trager te lezen. Ook de moeilijkere passages worden in de brieven onderbroken door zinnen over Parijs of het weer of erg liefkozende begroetingen aan zijn vrouw.
Blij dat ik het eindelijk af heb, zou het later nog eens moeten lezen wanneer ik misschien wat meer Rilke gelezen zou hebben of wat meer geduld heb, geen idee.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dear Rilke here a delight. The Letters on Cézanne are a sharp collection of pieces on the painter, but of course, art more broadly as well. I’ve probably encountered more misses than hits in terms of writing on painting. I love Rilke’s emphasis on his own obsession with the same exhibition.

These letters end up as a structure, a poetic entirety. It is so delightful to see Clara Rilke in the letters despite her absence. The introduction to my edition asserts that she was quite his equal in discussing art. This is entirely perceptible here.

Something to reread I think. Only takes a few hours, after all. I’ve been entertained by the man lately.

[Suzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rilke’s letters enveloped me in childlike wonder and hope and pulled me into the soul of impressionism, beckoning and even urging to be perceptive, to cloak myself in colours (violet always and always). In these colours there are other worlds tucked away and ready for experiencing if only we look deeper and longer and more affectionately - at Cézanne and perhaps life, too? Rilke wrote: “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, […] 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.”

[Tomas Serrien · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of this collection of letters from Rilke to his wife Clara is very much to my liking and is well summarized in the Dutch edition by philologist Philip van der Eijk: the goal of the letters is ‘To say what cannot actually be said' and thereby 'To evoke reality in all its richness and to bring it to speak to us'

Rilke sees paintings by Cézanne at an exhibition in Paris in 1907 and experiences 'a shock of recognition' which he then tries to approach phenomenologically by ‘letting painted phenomena speak for itself’. He is searching and pasting words onto experiences which he realizes can never be fully understood.

Rilke embraces this impossible task in his typical lyrical style, full of pathos and colorful descriptions. At the end his letters unfortunately touched me too little in terms of content, but the whole idea of searching for words about ‘experiences’ to capture paintings is very interesting. Rilke has illustrated this philosophy very well with this little book. The comparison of looking for words/new vocabularies to capture elusive experiences with music, literature or art in general is apt, even to humans who cannot see, hear or taste.

[Eric Cartier · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read most of this small book during breaks at work in patches of sunlight on the third floor of the State Library of Louisiana, which made for a tingling experience. These are a great poet's prose descriptions of his expanding capacity for perception in the presence of the works by one of the great French painters. Even giving the text less than my full attention, my awareness of all the colors within my field of vision increased, along with the humming activity of the world around me. I'd recommend this to anyone interested in the work of Rilke and/or Cezanne; if you already dig them both and haven't read this, you'll be delighted when you do.

[paranoidmarvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

«کلارا، حس می‌کنم ما انسان‌ها عادت کرده‌ایم که جهان را در قالبِ هیجان ببینیم — همه‌چیز را یا زیبا یا زشت، یا خوب یا بد.
اما سزان دارد به من می‌آموزد که در میانه‌ی این دو قطب بایستم، در منطقه‌ای که دیگر داوری وجود ندارد، فقط حضور.»

«در پرتره‌ها، سزان آن‌قدر آرام و بی‌رحم نگاه کرده که همه‌ی هیجان‌ها تبخیر شده‌اند و چیزی مانده شبیه به جوهرِ هستی:
آدمی که دیگر خود را بازی نمی‌کند، فقط هست.
چنان که گویی طبیعتِ بی‌جان هم در او ادامه یافته است — یک «سیب انسانی»، سنگی که نفس می‌کشد.»

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

"How great this watching of his was how unimpeachably accurate, is almost touchingly confirmed by the fact that, without even remotely interpreting his expression or presuming himself superior to it, he reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter-of-fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog."

[Deni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Por Dios, una belleza que escribe en tiempos de los Nuevos Poemas, a la par que se desarrollan los Cuadernos de Malte. La lucidez y sensibilidad inigualable de Rilke a la que siempre hay que volver y volver.

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. I picked this up when I needed it.

[Gin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wish I could write like him on art or even the everyday events.

[Gretel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Such a low rating?
Well, yes, because when I read this book about four years ago I was bored out of my fucking mind, annoyed, and didn't really like Rilke's musing. Now, I don't want to say my rating would still be the same. Maybe because I was forced to read it for university and the constant self-important babbling of the teachers influenced my view on Rilke's letters.
Or maybe everything was as bad as I remember it being. I don't know.
I will have to revisit Rilke's musing on Cezanne. For now, everytime I think of this book, I will remember the very long, flowery descriptions and uninteresting thoughts on everything. But what I will remember most is two of the three teachers. Two of the worst I ever had the misfortune to meet.
Sorry, Rilke.

I guess I should give this book another chance. Another time. Maybe when I've finished my master's thesis in June.

[Harry · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's poetry to Rilke's thoughts on Cezanne - incredible phrasing and imagery. The thinking doesn't go any deeper but it gets finer and detailed. Written in the rapt aesthetic servitude of modernism, this can sometimes feel a bit over-ripe. But the format ofthis book, which was compiled from Rilke's letters to his wife after seeing a show of Cezannes, emphasizes very earthy values of looking hard and sharing sweetly.

[Graciele Marim · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my most beloved authors writing about one of my most beloved painters. It couldn´t be better.

[Zijin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rilke works on me as the torso of Apollo works on him: You must change your life.

[Özgün Onat · Rating 3 out of 5]

CEZANNE ÜZERİNE MEKTUPLAR / RAINER MARIA RILKE
Rilke daha önce kalemiyle tanışmadığım yazarlardan (külliyat okumak, ders çalışmaktan fırsat bulamadım ). Bunu bilen arkadaşım doğum günü hediyesi olarak bu kitabını hediye olarak gönderdi ben de ancak okuyup, yorumunu yazıyorum.
Rilke, 1875 – 1926 yılları arasında yaşamış Alman edebiyatında lirik şiirin en önemli temsilcilerindendir ( buldummmm şair olduğu için tanışamamışız). Linz Ticaret Akademisi’ne kaydolan yazar aynı zamanda Prag’da edebiyat ve sanat tarihi de okudu. İlk şiirlerini ‘Yaşam ve Şiirler’ adıyla bu yıllarda yayınladı. Rodin’in hayatını yazmak için gittiği Paris’te onun özel sekreterliğini yaptı. Düzyazı türündeki Auguste Rodin, ilk önemli yapıtıdır. Tirieste yakınlarında bir soyluya ait Duino Şatosunda kaldığı dönemde yazdığı en ünlü eseri Duino Ağıtları da okunma sırasını bekliyor.
Üzerine eser yazdığı Paul Cezanne ise, 1839 – 1906 yıllarında yaşamış, Fransız gezgin ve post-empresyonist ressam. ( ben empresyonist ressamları – Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir- tercih etmekteyim, post olunca işler biraz karışıyor). Kübizm ile empresyonizm arasında köprü kurmuştur. Modern resmin babası olarak adlandırılır.
Kitaba dönersek; 7 Ekim 1907 (pazartesi) mektubunda; “Sergilerde, etrafta dolaşan insanları resimlerden çok daha ilginç bulurum.” Diyen bir cümle vardı. Aynı fikirde olduğumuza sevindim. Sadece sergilerde değil, müzelerde de gelenleri gözlemliyorum. Eserleri incelemelerini, haklarında konuşmalarını izliyorum. Neden orada olduklarından çok sergilenenler üzerine fikirleri ve eserlerin onlar üzerindeki etkisini merak ediyorum. Onlarla benim ortak bir noktamız var mı diye. Ama laf aramızda özellikle sergilerde ziyaretçilerin çoğu eserlerden çok ortamla ilgileniyorlar, orada bulunmak sosyal açıdan onlara yetiyor.
21 Ekim 1907 tarihli mektupta; Cezanne’nin 21 Eylül 1905 tarihli mektubunda. “Sağlığım kötü ama çalışmaya devam ediyorum. Resim yaparak ölmeye ant içtim. “ diye yazdığını ve istediği gibi öldüğünü yazıyor. Hangi dalda eser verirseniz verin tüm sanatçıların istediği aynı galiba. Sahne sanatçıları da sahnede ölmek istemez mi?
Ressamları ve tablolarını, tekniklerini anlatırken bir yerde: “Zincifre rengi” diyordu. İlk defa duyduğum bu rengi araştırdım. Zincifre adlı mineralden üretilen parlak kırmızı renkmiş. Antik Roma dönemi süslemeleri, Rönesans dönemi resimleri ile Çin'de sıklıkla kullanılmıştır, diyor wikipedia amca.
3 Haziran 1907 ile 4 Kasım 1907 arasında yazılmış 29 mektupta Rilke, başta Cezanne olmak üzere Gaugin, Rodin, Van Gough, Goya, Manet gibi sanatçılardan bahsederken yaptıkları eserleri karşılaştırarak tarzlarından, farklılıklarından bahsediyor.
Aslında ben mektup tarzı yazılmış eserleri pek sevmem. (Ne de olsa polisiye – gerilim seven bir okuruz, Christie, Grange, Ümit ve diğerleri ) Ortaokulda Balzac’ın İki Yeni Gelinin Anıları’nı okumuştum, içim bayılmıştı (Jules Verne’inin macera dolu fantastik romanları, Christie’nin gizemli cinayetleri varken ). Gene de o mektuplar karşılıklıydı hiç değilse, olaylar, yaşananlar çözümlenebiliyor, sorular cevaplanıyordu. Bu kitapta ise kime yazıldığı belli olmayan, karşılığı gelmeyen mektuplar. Şikayet ettiğime bakmayın, Rilke’nin kalemiyle tanışırken dönemin sanatçıları ve eserleri hakkında da bilgi sahibi oluyorsunuz.

[Kurt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Las cartas nos revelan la colateralidad de la prosa de Rilke y la pintura de Cezanne. De una manera clara, auténtica, precisa, sincera, instantánea y veraz, Rilke relata su acercamiento a la pintura de Cézanne y como esta aproximación le dio voz a la inmensurable paleta de palabras. La utilización de tiempos y espacios contienen a las cartas de una fuerza expresiva, que busca la objetividad como campo de trabajo para su realización.
Asimilar las cosas con tiempo y paciencia, dejando a un lado todo pensamiento y prejuicio. Expresar las cosas como son dando voz a su belleza interior.
El trabajo es más difícil cuando se quiere describir una pintura, ya que esta a diferencia de la naturaleza, contiene en sí misma las emociones, prejuicios e ideas que el pintor expone en los colores y sombras. ¿Hasta qué punto se puede estar en el presente simplemente con empeño, sin que nuestro juicio empañe nuestra creación artística?
Mucha del pensamiento rilkeano está correlacionado tiempo después a la filosofía de Krishnamurti. 

"Ese trabajo que no tenía ya preferencias,  ni inclinaciones, ni caprichos difíciles de satisfacer y cuyo mínimo componente había sido ponderado en la balanza de una conciencia infinitamente sensible; ese trabajo que concentraba en su contenido de color con tanta escrupulosidad lo que era, que en un más allá del color, comenzaba a vivir una nueva existencia sin recuerdos anteriores. "

"La mirada artística tenía que haberse adecuado de tal modo que pudiera ver aún en lo terrible y en apariencia sólo repulsivo lo que es, y que  también tiene importancia con todo el resto de lo existente."

"Lo contundente, el devenir cosa, la realidad, llevada hasta lo indestructible a través de su propia experiencia del objeto."

"Esa falta de originalidad, esa seguridad de no extraviarse en un acercamiento a la naturaleza múltiple, sino más bien de descubrir con seriedad y detenimiento en aquella variedad exterior,  la interior riqueza inagotable. "

"Ningún artista debería tener conciencia de sus ideas para que pueda exprimir aquello que contiene en su interior."

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I've been admiring the splendor of these little fragments for days and am truly ashamed that I was not happy when I was permitted to walk about in a superabundance of them. One lives so badly, because one always comes into the present unfinished, unable, distracted. I cannot think back on any time of my life without such reproaches and worse."

"If only one did not have comforting memories of times spent without working. Memories of lying still and taking comfort. Memories of hours spent in simple waiting, or leafing through old illustrations, or reading some novel or other-: and heaps of memories like these all the way back to childhood. Whole realms and districts of life lost, lost even for the retelling, because of the seduction that still may inhere in their idleness."

"... 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. A large fan-shaped poplar, shedding its leaves, played in front of this completely supportless blue, in front of the incomplete, exaggerated designs of a vastness which the good Lord holds out before him without any knowledge of perspective.
Since yesterday it's no longer so drenchingly monotonous. Something is blowing, is changing, and once in a while there are moments of a kind of profligate joy. Yesterday, when I first saw the little moon standing again in the mother-of-pearl sky, I understood that it was he that brought about the change and he vouches for it. Where will I be when he has grown up to the age of decision and holds court in the autumnal sky?-..."

[Cassie Rief · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am Cezanne, and Cezanne is me. The quippy one-liners about Cezanne’s approach to art and dogged determination to succeed, and Rainer’s blunt yet poetic observation of his personality and unassuming subject matter, had me eagerly turning the page for more.

…“What a good conscience he must have had…oh, yes: he was happy, way inside somewhere.” And then we looked at ‘artistic’ things which he may have made in Paris…”

“I know a few things from his last years when he was old and shabby and children followed him every day on his way to his studio, throwing stones at him as if at a bad dog. But inside, way inside, he was marvelously beautiful, and every once and awhile he would furiously shout something absolutely glorious at one of his rare visitors. You can imagine how that happened.”

“Out there, something vaguely terrible on the increase; a little closer by, indifference and mockery, and then suddenly this old man in his work, painting nudes only from old sketches he had made forty years ago in Paris, knowing that Aix would not allow him a model. “At my age,” he says - “I couldn’t get a woman below fifty at best….” so he uses his old drawings and lays his apples on bed covers which Madame Bremond will surely miss someday, and places a wine bottle among them or whatever he happens to find. And makes his “saints” out of such things; and forces them - forces them - to be beautiful, to stand for the whole world and all joy and all glory, and doesn’t know whether he has persuaded them to do it for him.”

I could go on and on…

[Journey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Letters on Cézanne did not speak to me as Rilke’s most deep or insightful work, but it provides an interesting perspective: his letters to his wife, Clara Westhoff, exploring his impressions of his visit to Paris and continuing daily visits to the retrospective exhibit of Cézanne’s art over a period of a month or so. The reader can appreciate Rilke’s deepening appreciation (beginning sight) and understanding of the Cézanne’s work.

A couple of quotes of interest to me from the Forward written by Heinrich Wiegand Petzet:

“ … a remark Rilke made to Count Harry Kessler in front of a picture of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire: ‘Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.’”

“Rilke’s attraction to these works was not primarily artistic; there was a presence in them of the artists’ nearness to God, and it was this that moved him.”

“The full range of Rilke’s discovery can only be intimated here. It is mainly an understanding of the decisive role ‘balance’ plays in this art; that balance between the reality of nature and the reality of the image which was Cézanne’s entire striving and which, when he achieved it, he likened to a ‘folding of hands’”.

“… scales of an infinitely responsive conscience, and which so incorruptibly reduced a reality to its color content that it resumed a new existence in a beyond of color, without any previous memories.”

The last letter concludes with a quote from Rilke’s earlier letter of 1903 to Lou Andreas-Salomé:

“Somehow I too must find a way of making things; not plastic, written things, but realities that arise from the craft itself. Somehow I too must discover the smallest constituent element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of expressing everything.”

[Alex Wexelman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once, when perusing the kitchen of a former boss, I found a cookbook. In it, the writer said that water was the heaviest substance on Earth. That one could drink a beer with ease, but to drink a glass of water with the same gusto was a weighty challenge. Reading Rilke's Letters on Cezanne was akin to drinking a glass of water. These letters are dense. In the Translator's Forward, Joel Agee warns, "The reader will encounter a few lines where Rilke's language hovers so tentatively and elusively around its subject that a second or third reading is needed before meaning begins to emerge." I found this helpful because I often struggled to suss out exactly what the poet was getting at. Yes, you love Cezanne, I'd say, but what are you trying to tell us? I felt like Annie Sullivan trying to coax meaning from Helen Keller's murmurs. Or, you know, something less extreme but equally incomprehensible.

Reading this book took me a while because, ultimately, I did not enjoy it. There are moments of lucidity where Rilke is waxing poetic about colors and images and those are great. But I tended to feel stupid reading this short book. Why was it so hard to figure out what he was saying? It felt like that meme of the image where nothing is discernable. I'd re-read a few times before I decided I just had to move on. Hopefully, his Letters to a Young Poet are less difficult to parse.

[Vladivostok · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joy in work and objectivity in art: "It is this limitless objectivity, refusing any kind of meddling in an alien unity, that strikes people as so offensive and comical in Cezanne's portraits. They accept, without realizing it, that he represented apples, onions, and orange purely by means of color (which they still regard as a subordinate means of painterly expression), but as soon as he turns to landscape they start missing the interpretation, the judgement, the superiority, and when it comes to portraits, there is that rumor concerning the artist's intellectual conception, which has been passed on even to the most bourgeois, so successfully that you can already see the signs of it in Sunday photographs of couples and families. And her Cezanne naturally strikes them as totally inadequate and not even worthy of discussion. He is actually alone in this Salon as he was in life, and even the painters, the young painters, walk by more quickly because they see the dealers on his side..."