Letters on Cezanne by Rainer Maria Rilke

First published:Briefe uber Cezanne, 1952 (English translation, 1985)

Type of work: Letters

Time of work: June, September, and October, 1907

Locale: Paris

Principal Personages:

• Rainer Maria Rilke, a poet
• Clara Westhoff Rilke, his wife

Form and Content

When the poet Rainer Maria Rilke returned to Paris in the spring of 1907 after a ten-month absence, he was in the midst of work on two prose projects: Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910; The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1930, 1958) and his two-part monograph Auguste Rodin (1903; English translation, 1919). These two works conveniently define the two sorts of growth to which Rilke bears witness in his Letters on Cezanne—growth as an artist and person, on the one hand, and, on the other, growth as an observer of art and, to some extent, as a critic. These letters also demonstrate the impossibility of separating in Rilke’s life the two kinds of growth: For him, critical observation finds its natural justification in personal insight, artistic self-discovery.

Letters on Cezanne comprises thirty-one missives of varying length, written in June, September, and October of 1907 to Rilke’s wife, Clara Westhoff Rilke. Although the letters were composed simply as letters—Rilke was always a prolific letter writer and at this time wrote to Clara daily, or nearly so—he toyed even while writing them with the idea of a more public exposition on Paul Cezanne’s work. Rilke feared, however, that his writing about Cezanne might be too subjective:

It’s a mistake (and I have to acknowledge this once and for all) to think that one who has such private access to pictures is for that reason justified in writing about them; their fairest judge would surely be the one who could quietly confirm them in their existence without experiencing in them anything more or different than facts. But within my life, this unexpected contact, the way it came and established itself, confirms a great many things and is most relevant.

Again Rilke acknowledges the intense connection he makes between himself and Cezanne when, after describing Cezanne’s life and personality, he writes: “Fare well . . . tomorrow I’ll speak of myself again. But you know how much of myself was in what I told you today.” In spite of his reservations, however, Rilke saw these letters as something different from his other correspondence, confirming them (“those letters on Cezanne”) as vital to his own work and, indeed, later expressing the wish to have them published as a book.

As edited by his wife, Letters on Cezanne bears witness to the “double world”— the external life and the internal—that Rilke so often bemoaned. The letters are both an exposition of his attempt “to get very close to the facts” of Cezanne’s work and a record of a process begun earlier in his life and perhaps never completed. “It was the turning point in these paintings which I recognized,” he writes, “because I had just reached it in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow. . . .” Though nearly half the letters do discuss or at least mention Cezanne, the collection is not exclusively devoted to that artist. The first letter (“You’re back again”) and the last (written “in the train Prague-Breslau”) place this collection dramatically in the midst of Rilke’s always peripatetic life. Between the frames of arrival and departure, Rilke’s letters have as their subject above all art; within that general category, four major immediate subjects emerge: Rilke himself in Paris, Vincent van Gogh (who had died in 1890), Auguste Rodin (as whose secretary Rilke had served for a short time), and, most important, Paul Cezanne.

Critical Context

Though Rilke’s Letters on Cezanne is to a large extent a purely personal document—and its importance is largely its testimony to his own development as an artist—it stands also as a significant landmark in the understanding of Cezanne’s work. At the time of the Salon d’Automne of 1907, as Rilke notes, the public (and even painters and critics) showed little understanding of Cezanne. Rilke’s letter of October 16, for example, includes this bitter indictment of his times:

It is not possible that a time that can find satisfaction of its need for this kind of beauty [that of the Tivoli, an outdoor variety show] should also admire Cezanne and understand something of his devotion and hidden glory. The merchants make noise, that is all; and those who have a need to attach themselves to these things could be counted on the fingers of two hands, and they stand apart and are silent.

That Rilke’s letters closely anticipated later professional art critics and historians verifies Rilke’s importance to criticism of Cezanne.

Nevertheless, these letters are most interesting because of their documentation of an important turning point in Rilke’s personal and artistic life. Evidence of Cezanne’s importance to specific later works by Rilke is most obvious in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and in a poem written in the fall of 1908, “Requiem fur eine Freundin” (“Requiem for a Friend”). Rilke had begun writing The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in 1904, but in 1907 he was finding it paralyzingly difficult to continue. When he did continue this writing (primarily in 1908 and 1909), it was with Cezanne as an important stimulus to his work. Indeed, parts of his letters to his wife in the fall of 1907 appear in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge scarcely changed, and Rilke discusses Malte Laurids Brigge at length in his letter of October 19: “Suddenly (and for the first time) I understand the fate of Malte Laurids.” A year later he wrote of the still-unfinished prose work:

I should have written it last year, after those letters on Cezanne, which touched so directly and strongly on Malte: for Cezanne is nothing more than the first primitive, arid victory of which Malte was not yet capable. What was the death of Brigge, was Cezanne’s life, the life of his last thirty years. . . .

The importance of these letters to Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend,” written after the death of the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, has been noted by Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, who further notes: “A separate essay would have to be written on the impact of Cezanne on Rilke’s poetry. . . .” Suffice it to say here that Letters on Cezanne— on “the old man who walked somewhere far ahead, alone”—remains as a witness not only to that old man but also to the younger one who could write: “I can tell how I’ve changed by the way Cezanne is challenging me now. I am on the way to becoming a worker. . . .”

Bibliography

Bayley, John. “Big Three,” in The New York Review of Books. XXXII (December 5, 1985), pp. 3-4.

Moss, Howard. Review in The New Yorker. LXII (July 7, 1986), p. 80.

Petzet, Heinrich Wiegand. Foreword to Letters on Cezanne, 1985.

Prater, Donald. A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1986.

Rewald, John. Cezanne: A Biography, 1986.

Rolleston, James. Review of Letters on Cezanne in Southern Humanities Review. XXI (Spring, 1987), pp. 168-170.

Rolleston, James. Review of Rodin in Southern Humanities Review. XXI (Spring, 1987), pp. 168-170.

Rolleston, James. Review of Selected Poems in Southern Humanities Review. XXI (Spring, 1987), pp. 168-170.