Letters on Cezanne

From Library Journal
These letters to his wife were written by Rilke on a sojourn to Paris in 1907, where he found himself drawn to the Grand Palais every day to see a posthumous exhibit of Cezanne's paintings, staged one year after the French painter's death. Many of the letters are included in day-by-day succession, as Rilke outlines his deep affinity to Cezanne, as well as to van Gogh, in exquisite detail. Agee succeeds in capturing Rilke's instinct for language; we see the painters through Rilke's eyes as dedicated and committed to making paintings that stretch the viewer's imagination and capacity for devotion. This slender volume lacks illustrations, which would have been useful. Some of these letters appeared in Rilke's later masterwork, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (first published in English in 1952). Saying as much about Rilke as it does about Cezanne, this new volume is particularly suited to literature collections containing other works by Rilke and may be of interest in art schools and public libraries where there is an interest in Cezanne and van Gogh.Ellen Bates, New YorkCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Independent Publisher
Rilke's attraction to the fine arts is evident in much of his poetry and prose and especially in these letters to the sculptress Clara Rilke-Westhoff, his wife. They follow in time upon the monographs he published first on the landscape painters of Worpswede and then on August Rodin. Tlirough his talks with these and other artists, Rilke learned to see art from an artistic perspective, while his contact with Rodin even prompted him to reexamine his own work and to develop the concise structure, "objective telling," and multivalent evocativeness of his New Poems. The first volume of this poetry was in print when, in the fall of 1907, Rilke saw an exhibition of paintings by CA-zanne. Virtually every day he went to look at them and wrote about the things just seen. He also recalled paintings by other modems such as van Gogh, and as a counterpoint to the "new" observed in C6zanne, he described an imaginary walk through an old palace. Then he explained why at this juncture he saw in C6zanne what he had not noticed in his works exhibited a few years earlier. "It was the turning point in these paintings which I recognized, because I had just reached it in my own work or at least come close to it somehow." This recognition of kinship forms the vibrating subtext of these letters. In an unparalleled way they highlight the distinctiveness of certain colors, their interdependence within a painting, and the "definitive picture-existence" of C6zanne's motifs. This smoothly translated edition of 1986 now available in paperback will give great pleasure to all those who love European art and literature.


Review
The greatness of Cezanne could be conveyed only by an artist equally great." --Howard Moss, The New Yorker



Review
The greatness of Cezanne could be conveyed only by an artist equally great." --Howard Moss, The New Yorker



Book Description
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.



About the Author
Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875 and traveled throughout Europe for much of his adult life, returning frequently to Paris. There he came under the influence of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and produced much of his finest verse, most notably the two volumes of New Poems as well as the great modernist novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Among his other books of poems are The Book of Images and The Book of Hours. He lived the last years of his life in Switzerland, where he completed his two poetic masterworks, the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. He died of leukemia in December 1926.

Joel Agee has also translated Elias Canetti, Friedrich Dürenmatt, Gottfried Benn, and another collection of Rilke's letters, Rilke and Benvenuta: An Intimate Correspondence. He won the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea, a verse play. He is the author of Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany and lives in Brooklyn.



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When Rilke first discovered Cezanne's paintings in an art salon in Paris, he was moved to remark, ``all reality is on his side.'' These letters, written to his wife, Clara, are the record of Rilke's efforts to impart something of Cezanne's la realisation to his own life and work, for the painter came to represent for Rilke, the poet, that perfect unity between the creator and his art which he must strive to emulate. A few impressions of van Gogh and other artists are interwoven, but the letters are primarily concerned with Cezanne. With luminous insight, clarity, and sympathy, they reflect how experiencing Cezanne's art became a sort of artistic watershed for Rilke, af ter which he could see with the ``right eyes.'' Highly recommended for liter ary and art collections. Carol J. Lich tenberg, Washington State Univ. Lib., Pullman


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