Rainer Maria Rilke, Excerpt from a letter to his wife Clara on Cézanne. (From Letters on Cézanne by R.M. Rilke)
Rilke was a pretty dramatic fellow - I always feel that his writings go way-way-way over the top. However, what can be better than an overly meticulous writer-observer, who cannot control his grotesque perception to describe an artist at work!
Paris ; October 9, 1907
...There he would sit then for hours, occupied with finding and taking in plans (of which, remarkably enough, he keeps speaking in exactly the same words as Rodin). He often reminds one of Rodin anyway in his expressions. As when he complains about how much his old city is being destroyed and disfigured. Only that where Rodin's great, self-confident equilibrium leads to an objective statement, fury overcomes this sick, solitary old man. Evenings on the way home he gets angry at some change, arrives in a rage and, when he notices how much the anger is exhausting him, promises himself : I will stay at home; work, nothing but work.
Paul Cézanne from Mont Saint-Victoire series, 1904
From such alterations for the worse in little Aix he then deduces in horror how things must be going elsewhere. Once when present conditions were under discussion, industry and the like, he broke out "with terrible eyes": "ça va mal... C'est effrayant, la vie !"
Outside, something vaguely terrifying in process of growth; a little closer, indifference and scorn, and then suddenly this old man in his work, who no longer paints his nudes from anything but old drawings he made forty years ago in Paris, knowing that Aix would allow him no model. "At my age," he said, "I could get at best a fifty-year-old, and I know that noteven such a person is to be found in Aix." So he paints from his old drawings. And lays his apples down on bedspreads Madame Bremond certainly misses one day, and puts his wine bottles among them whatever he happens to find. And (like van Gogh) makes his "saints" out of things like that; and compels them, compels them to be beautiful, to mean the whole, world and all happiness and all glory, and doesn't know whether he has bought them to doing that for him. And sits in the garden like an old dog, the dog of this work which calls him again and beats him and lets him go hungry...
Comments