Malerisch Modernism and the rise of the patchwork subject Color, language and self in Julius Meier‐Graefe and Rainer Maria Rilke, by way of Boschini, Wölfflin and Cézanne By Max Koss Paul Cézanne, Madame Cézanne in a striped skirt, 1877 ... liegt es im Wesen der malerischen Darstellung, der Erscheinung den Charakter des Schwebenden zu geben: die Form fängt an zu spielen… das Ganze gewinnt den Schein einer rastlos quellenden, nie endenden Bewegung… Sie bleibt für die Anschauung ein Unerschöpfliches.1 Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe – Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst (Munich: F. Bruckmann KG, 1915), 21. 1 Introduction When in October 1907 Rainer Maria Rilke bumped into Julius Meier‐Graefe at an exhibition, the two men, the former a poet of some renown and the latter one of Germany’s leading art critics, had already been acquainted for a few years.2 Yet, this occasion was special, for the meeting happened in Paris, at the Salon d’Automne, where, one year after his death, Paul Cézanne received his first major retrospective, an event that would change the course of modern art forever, catapulting Cézanne into the consciousness of a broader public and in particular many artists of the younger generations, not previously exposed so insistently to the work of the reclusive artist. Even though 1907 proved to be a pivotal year in Cézanne reception, it was not the beginning of it and certainly not the end, as Michael Fried has recently reminded us when he said that he too has many unresolved questions.3 I want to take this paper as an opportunity to zoom in on these two seminal figures in German modernism and reflect on how, in 1907, they received Paul Cézanne’s work. Reminding ourselves as to what was at stake then, by looking at discourse surrounding the work (but obviously only a microscopic selection of it4), will allow to elucidate some debates and notions of modernism that have been all too readily discredited in recent years, namely the positively rich legacy of a critical formalism of late 19th and early 20th century Germany, of which Meier‐Graefe was a part and which we also have to understand as the historical preconditions for Rilke’s endeavors.5 Of main interest will be the notion of painterlines, or malerisch, as employed by Meier‐Graefe, and, as I will try to show towards the end of the paper, explicated and surpassed by Rilke. In a first step, I will therefore give a short historical overview of the crucial moments in the development of the notion of painterliness. In a next step, I will look at the writings of Meier‐Graefe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe über Cézanne , edited by Clara Rilke (Wiesbaden: Insel‐Verlag, 1953), 20: “Ich war wieder im Salon d’Automne heute vormittag, Meier‐Graefe war wieder bei den Cézannes anzutreffen… Graf Kessler war auch da…”, letter from 10/7/1907 (Monday). 3 Critics and the small avant‐garde circles had known Cézanne throughout, as he had been working since the 1860s, for a time also in Paris, and the first major considerations of this work already appeared during his lifetime, especially in France, such as by Huysmans and through his correspondence with Emile Bernard. 4 Other important appraisals that have appeared in 1907 are for example Maurice Denis’s essay on the painter, which Roger Fry then translated and published in the Burlington Magazine in 1910. 5 An English language appraisal of Julius Meier‐Graefe remains to be written. The only in depth analsysis remains Kenworth Moffet’s Meier‐Graefe as art critic from 1973, which has a strong bias towards Greenbergian formalism. 2 1 especially his early take on Cézanne. In a last step, I will consider how Rilke is taking some of the issues, especially that of color, to materialize his own take on malerisch, through the letters he wrote during those days of the Salon d’Automne to his wife Clara, which were, it should be said from the outset, written as literary texts, with view of later publication.6 The history of malerisch unfolds in three interlocking arenas: the works of art themselves, in our case Paul Cézanne’s paintings, and how they were made – an aspect I will only rarely touch upon; the critical issues that painters and critics found in the paintings; and the style of written discourse that they chose to discuss those issues.7 Throughout this paper, I will concentrate on the latter two arenas and what I will try to understand is the relationship between images and their verbalization, and to what extent structures of painterliness can said to migrate between these two realms. By that I hope to shed some light on the debate about the purview of the different arts, which is at the heart of the formalist enterprise. Eventually, I will try to understand shifting conceptions of subjectivity through the text‐image relationship during that time. Malerisch ‐ a very sketchy genealogy 1907 marks an early high point of German reception of modern French art. A short historical detour will tell us why: Julius Meier‐Graefe moved to Paris sometime in late 1895, the year of Cézanne’s first major gallery show. He had just been ousted from Pan magazine, which he had founded the previous year in Berlin, because of the outrage that his inclusion of a print by Henry Toulouse Lautrec created amongst the more conservative board members of the Pan association, which published the magazine. By the time the 27‐year‐old Rilke arrived in Paris in 1902 to work on a monograph about the sculptor Auguste Rodin, Meier‐Graefe had moved on decisively in his own career and was running one of the most pre‐eminent Art Nouveau galleries in Europe, La Maison Moderne. It is not clear whether they had already met then, but by the time 6 Ralph Köhnen, Sehen als Textkultur – Intermediale Beziehungen zwischen Rilke und Cezanne (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 1995), 108‐109. 7 Philip Sohm, Pittoresco – Marco Boschini, his critics, and their critiques of painterly brushwork in seventeenth‐ and eighteenth century Italy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 2. 2 Meier‐Graefe had closed La Maison Moderne and moved back to Berlin in 1904, he became instantly the centre of a circle of artists and intellectuals in Berlin, which included among many others Tilla Durieux, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Dehmel, Max Reinhardt, and also Rilke, even though the latter remained mainly in Paris. There, Rilke intensified his engagement with the art of Rodin, became his amanuensis in 1906 for a short while and wrote, additionally to the monograph on Rodin from 1903, a lecture, that he would give throughout Europe in subsequent years. 1904 was also the year in which Meier‐Graefe published the first volume of this Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, his major early art historical achievement, in which he lays out, much to the dismay of the German cultural elite of the time, his predilection for a modernist art, whose heroes were Delacroix, Renoir, Manet and Cézanne.8 Entwicklungsgeschichte was published in at least three editions and constantly revised for nearly 20 years. When Meier‐Graefe had eventually published the last of the three tomes in the early 1920s, the section on Cézanne of the first edition, which Rilke would have been aware of when writing his letters to Clara, had been expanded and deepened from five to 36 pages. We can assume that Rilke would have read the first volume of the first edition, in which Meier‐Graefe also expounds on the history of the painterly, malerisch. In all likelihood, Rilke was also aware of his book Impressionisten: Guy, Manet, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Cézanne published by Piper just before the Salon d’Automne of 1907. If there is a sense of temporal sequence to this paper, it will be that Rilke’s writing was influenced by Meier‐Graefe. Let me start then with a long quote, taken from Meier‐Graefe’s Entwicklungsgeschichte, which I believe contains many issues pertinent to his project and our analysis of it in regards to Cézanne and Rilke, as well as giving us a sense of Meier‐Graefe’s own style of writing: Die christliche Kirche hat sich um die Malerei schlechterdings unsterbliche Verdienste erworben. Ihre künstlerische Rolle setzte in dem Moment ein, als das Römertum in den letzten Zügen lag. Mit dem Prinzip ihres Radikalismus: Alles entgegengesetzt dem zu machen, was die Römer geschaffen hatten, diktierte sie 8 Julius Meier‐Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Munich: Piper & Co. Verlag, 1904). 3 sich sofort eine gewisse Marschroute auch für die Kunst. Natürlich geschah das nicht von ästhetischen Gesichtspunkten aus. Der Anfang zeigt sie barbarisch wie den Protestantismus. Kunst war Götzendienst. Dieses götzische Wesen verkörperte sich für die Christen in der Skulptur, dem Träger der heidnischen Gottheit, und wurde daher ein für allemal verbannt. Erst als ein Jahrtausend den Radikalismus geschwächt hatte, fing man an, milder über diese Dinge zu denken. Ganz erholt hat sich die Skulptur nie von dieser Vernachlässigung, und ihre Entwicklung zum Abstrakten ist dementsprechend weit hinter der Malerei zurückgeblieben. Sie blieb Architektur bis zur Zeit unserer Großväter. Was ihr in vorchristlicher Zeit und bei allen Völkern gehört hatte, wurde Eigentum der Malerei. Der Zweck war nicht im Entferntesten derselbe. Die Malerei war Schrift, Verständigungsmittel für die primitiven Zwecke der Kirche. Kunst wurde sie erst, als der Gedanke die Musse fand, zu Bildern zu werden, als der wachsende Reichtum die Kirche ausschmückte. Sie war daher ursprünglich Strich, Linie, Zeichen aus Linien; ihre Entwicklung war eine Entwicklung der Linie. Und zugleich kann man ihre Geschichte auf eine Zersetzungsgeschichte der Linie zugunsten der Fläche zurückführen. Alles was jener genommen wurde, kam dieser zugute. Das Verhältnis zwischen beiden ist der physiologische Punkt der ganzen Geschichte. Die Linie war die Handschrift des Stils. Sie steigt vom brutalen Schmuckstück zum höchsten Ausdruck und wird der Träger der mächtigsten, umfassendsten Tradition, der Gotik. Sie sinkt, mit ihr sinkt die Tradition, und die Persönlichkeit steigt in die Höhe. Sie verflüchtigt sich in die Fläche, die zuletzt in unserer modernen, ganz abstrakten Kunst die höchste Bedeutung erreicht.9 This lengthy excerpt, in its later, expanded version entitled “Linie und Fläche” is entitled in the 1904 edition “Die Entstehung des Malerischen”, the birth of painterliness. It is, like so much in Meier‐Graefe, programmatic, hyperbolic, and delivered with an unflinching, almost acerbic authority, to the point of often sacrificing clarity by using ellipses, giving the whole an ambiguously polemic character. And yet, it is a formidable piece of formalist writing too. It presents us with a narrative arch of Western art, starting somewhere in the middles ages, during the time of Christian ascendency and spanning 1500 years of European history. The lead roles in the epic battle Meier‐Graefe is describing are between line and expansion. Fläche could easily translated with area, space or surface. Expanse, or as I have it, expansion seems however to be most appropriate to express the sense of messiness of an ever‐unstable meeting point between line and expansion. This, in turn, calls for a momentary look back, past Meier‐Graefe, and into the history of malerisch, a word much en vogue with German art historians of the 9 Meier‐Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte, 31. The original text is neatly fitted into a single page. 4 era, such as Heinrich Wölfflin, whose understanding of it we will come to in a moment. But his use, as straightforward as it first might seem, is in turn informed by a long history of conceptual messiness. As has been argued by Philip Sohm in his book Pittorecso, the origins of the modern notion of malerisch reach back into the 17th century.10 It was the Venetian art critic Marco Boschini whose Carta del navegar pitoresco, published in Venice in 1660, redefined the word pittoresco in ways that anticipated Wölfflin.11 The word itself was used originally as one of many in a diffuse and constantly contested field of notions describing varieties of brushwork, the quintessential quality that sets painting apart from the other arts. From the beginning, as Sohm makes clear, efforts at describing brushwork and the sheer variety that it offers were marred by that very variety. Boschini is just one example in a long line of writers trying to come to terms with the nature of brushwork. His Carta for example is a strongly idiosyncratic work, written in Venetian dialect, as a 700 epic page poem, relying on maritime imagery of vessels and the seas. The word pittoresco itself belongs to a lexical field that includes abbozzato, macchiato, sprezzato, spegazzoni and others. I am not going to go into them in detail – Sohm has done that ‐ but it is worth noting here that especially the notion of macchiato and its related noun, macchia, in German Fleck or Dickicht, or in English mark, stain, blotch will have pertinence and indeed inflect considerations by Meier‐Graefe and Rilke. Indeed, macchia could also be translated as brush, in the sense of thicket or scrub, hinting already at certain specific qualities of texture that we will have to understand in more detail, if we want to sound out the import of blotch and its correlatives for the notion of a viewing subject in Cézanne’s critical reception. Related to the notion of macchia is the notion of sketch and sketchiness. For Vasari, as Sohm reminds us, the practice of sketching, could, amongst other things, create sketchy form, “in forma di una macchia.”12 This goes to show how discussions of pittoresco or malerisch and its relatives are also more generally discussions of the finished versus the unfinished and of form versus Sohm writes: “The true origins of pittoresco will probably elude detection, forever buried in the unrecorded realm of conversation, but the mans by which it was popularized can be precisely determined.” He goes on to make the important distinction between pittoresco as pictorial and as painterly, and how these two notions eventually converge. Sohm, Pittoresco, 96. 11 Sohm, Pittoresco, 1. 12 Sohm, Pittoresco, 36. 10 5 formlessness, a theme of utmost importance in Cézanne reception, whose blanks on the canvas pose considerable interpretative challenges. As Sohm puts it in regards to the 17th century: The history of pittoresco, to remind the reader again, is how seventeenth‐ century critics came to appreciate the irresolution of form, without appealing to the formative concept in the artist’s mind. It is also how seventeenth‐century critics came to accept this painterly form in finished, rather than sketched, works…13 When art shifts from line to expansion by way of sketchiness, it also shifts the conditions of its being viewed, with the viewer being under increased pressure to appropriate for himself a painterly vocabulary in order to make sense of what he sees. This is not the moment to discuss differences or continuities between Boschini and Wölfflin, although much could be said, but as it stands, Boschini’s critical writings were not rediscovered until 1914, when Wölfflin had already developed his own theories about the relationship between the linear and the painterly styles, which he equated to two distinct historical epochs, namely the High Renaissance and what he called Baroque, but which might be more appropriately called Mannerist art.14 Some of Wölfflin’s main arguments were already laid out in his 1888 book, Renaissance und Barock, where he gives prominence to the latter term, without so much framing the art of that period as a period of decline, as had been fashionable until then, but rather as a shift into another, distinct style. He develops his system, culminating in the publication in 1915 of his Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, in which five binaries are said to be fundamental to representational form. The first of these is the pair of linear style versus painterly style. The other four are plane and recession, the closed and open form, multiplicity and unity, and ultimately what he calls absolute and relative Klarheit des Gegenständlichen, describing an altered relation, or orientation as he puts it, of the subject to the world. For Wölfflin, all of these binaries are operative, to varying degrees, when shifts in style occur. 13 14 Sohm, Pittoresco, 33. Sohm, Pittoresco, 243. 6 Before returning to our quote from Meier‐Graefe’s Entwicklungsgeschichte, I want to draw out briefly a few notions that I think are important for our understanding of the conceptual horizon in or against which Meier‐Graefe and also Rilke are operating. First, there is what Wölfflin calls the “Triumph des Scheins über das Sein.”15 For him, the shift from the earlier style to the later one is also one where the haptic image, “das Tastbild”, characterized by the linear style, is replaced by the optical image, “das Sehbild”.16 Fundamentally, this is a shift into a world of appearances, in which things in themselves are replaced by things in context, i.e. by a certain de‐reification and relationality. Furthermore, Wölfflin makes a distinction between painterly and unpainterly color. Painterly color, and this will become especially important for Rilke’s understanding, is one that expresses becoming and change, “Werden und Sich‐Wandeln.”17 Taking the example of Rembrandt, he talks about a mysterious depth from which color emerges onto the canvas, and likens this process to a volcanic eruption. This image is of course riddled with paradoxes, since the painter with his body remains standing before the canvas when painting and applying color. Wölfflin seems to be expressing a fundamental reversal however, whereby, in a process remaining largely unexplained, the appearance of color is entirely divested of any human interaction. In a similar vain, Wölfflin describes the dissolution of form, as expressed by painterliness in terms of movement: “Es gibt nichts Malerisches als die bewegte Menge eines Marktes.”18 This last point is important inasmuch as it points towards a fundamental shift of the nature of subjectivity and goes perhaps some way to explain the mysteriousness inscribed to painterliness. What Wölfflin is describing, especially in the Grundbegriffe, is a history of the image, in which at the beginning, the human subject is clearly distinct from the objects surrounding it, whereas in its teleological movement, these distinctions become ever less clear, to the point that the boundaries of the subject become permeable. Two short quotes might elucidate this point further: “… so scheint das Helle des Wölfflin, Grundbegriffe, 24. Wölfflin, Grundbegriffe, 23. 17 Wölfflin, Grundbegriffe, 56. 18 Wölfflin, Grundbegriffe, 28. 15 16 7 Körpers aus dem Dunkel des Raumes sich gleichsam herauszuentwickeln. Es ist als ob alles aus einem Stoff wäre.”19 The theme of fabric relates to another image Wölfflin is using, when he talks about the painterliness of ruins: “Aus denselben Gründen gibt es eine malerische Schönheit der Ruine… wenn die Ränder unruhig werden… kann der Baum mit den bewegten Formen der Natur … eine Bindung zu einem malerischen Ganzen eingehen.” Here, he intertwines a historical movement, symbolized by the ruins, with an ever increasing porosity and permeability of the margin, or the frame; again hinting at a new form of relationship between the viewing subject and the world, a relationship that certainly involves some form of bodily engagement with works of art, but has moved into a different dimension and activates a new form of receptivity in the viewing subject. Meier‐Graefe / Cézanne This brings me back to Julius Meier‐Graefe and our previous quote of his from the Entwicklungsgeschichte, where in the last paragraph the words “und die Persönlichkeit steigt in die Höhe“ seem to suggest an entirely different, diametrically opposed view of the history of malerisch. Although this observation is perhaps not entirely wrong, it seems to me that we need to differentiate and nuance here, especially when read together with his writings on Cézanne, which we will turn our attention to in a moment. What Meier‐Graefe has in mind is indeed a form of crystallization of an intellectual, critical self, where the historical move from a unified line and a common style, as was the case in Gothic art, to expansion, or Fläche coincides with the development of personal styles, that are echoed, and this is the crucial insight of Meier‐Graefe, by the development of painting as painting.20 He thus writes in the revised version of the text from the 1920s: Wölfflin, Grundbegriffe, 22. It should be noted however, that this is a gradual process. The shift is not from non‐art to art, but rather painting becomes increasingly more art‐like, the more it finds it muse in thought, as Meier‐Graefe puts it. 19 20 8 Je mehr sich die Malerei aus sich selbst heraus entwickelt, desto loser wird ihre Verbindung mit den anderen Künsten. Immer fremder steht die Persönlichkeit der Masse gegenüber.21 Wölfflin writes about painterliness: Nur die Erscheinung der Wirklichkeit ist aufgegangen, etwas ganz anderes als was die lineare Kunst mit ihrem plastisch bedingten Sehen gestaltete, und eben darum können die Zeichen, die der malerische Stil verwendet, keine direkte Beziehung mehr zur objektiven Form haben.22 Losing the direct relationship to objective form, which I read to be the mimetic function, becomes here a precondition for art to turn its attention towards other functions. What Wölfflin later describes somewhat vaguely as “blosse Erscheinung”, or mere appearance, can be understood as the inner workings of the image itself. Meier‐Graefe is even more explicit and posits the differentiation of the arts according to their own laws. And yet, both authors seem to be approaching this autonomy from different ends of the spectrum. Whereas Wölfflin argues for an increasingly dissolving subject, Meier‐Graefe’s subject is an ever‐increasing separated, more distinct, foreign subject. Turning our attention then to Meier‐Graefe’s piece on Cézanne in his 1907 Impressionisten, the exemplary character of the painter’s work to the critic’s notion of the autonomy of the arts becomes immediately apparent: Er verdient den Titel [Mystiker] nur, weil er aus einer bis jetzt noch für ihn allein bestehenden Welt, geschaffen von seinen Anlagen und seinen Wünschen, Vorgänge gewinnt. Das ganz und gar reale seines Werkes geht aus der nicht weniger als subjektiven Gesetzmäßigkeit innerhalb des enggezogenen Rahmens hervor, aus der Hingebung des Menschen an sine Kunst, wie sie in gleicher Treue vielleicht nur noch mal die Sachlichkeit van Goghs gelang. Mystisch wirkt seine Modifizierung des Kunstwerks, aber notwendig.23 In Meier‐Graefe’s eyes, Cézanne’s project has an internal logic and necessity, indeed, by force of its individuality, it seems, at least in this passage, to be a fully autonomous, self contained art form. For Meier‐Graefe, Cézanne’s work poses Julius Meier‐Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Munich: Piper & Co. Verlag, 1920), 35‐36. Wölfflin, Grundbegriffe, 23. 23 Julius Meier‐Graefe. Impressionisten: Guys – Manet – van Gogh – Pissarro – Cézanne (Munich and Leipzig: Piper & Co. Verlag, 1907), 183. 21 22 9 the problem however that the artist’s work does not actually fit all too neatly into his proto‐medium specificity. Indeed, there is a remarkable paragraph in the earlier five‐page exposition on Cézanne in the Entwicklungsgeschichte from 1904: Die Konsequenz war bei ihm also eine reine Sinnensache, er gab das war er konnte und wollte. Nicht ein Atom mehr; in äußerlichen Dingen nicht mal das. Es hat zuweilen nicht zu der Deckung geringfügiger weißer Stellen gelangt, die heute die Verzweiflung der ehrlichen Besitzer machen; ‐ die anderen malen sie zu. Aber dieses Äußerliche ist nicht mehr oder weniger als das ausgefranste Eckchen an einer schönen alten Tapisserie. Zuweilen ist auch die ganze Tapisserie um die letzte Deckschicht gekommen. Und auch das läßt man sich gefallen, weil das Gewebe immer wunderbar ist, auch wo es nur ein paar Fäden zeigt.24 Here, when he talks about the somewhat brushy corners of a beautiful old gobelin, Meier‐Graefe hints at what he would clarify in his Impressionisten book three year later, namely the difficulty Cézanne’s painting poses for an art history that tries to systematize and classify, i.e. put conceptual boundaries on it. We are, of course, also reminded here of Wölfflin’s description of ruins and the fact that their fragmentary, historical nature is the very condition of their being part of a larger whole. And indeed, Meier‐Graefe is forced in his own narrative, to acknowledge that Cézanne’s art is not an art of the image, but an art of vision, that for all intents and purposes exceeds the support on which it is painted.25 This is, I would argue, Meier‐Graefe’s Wölfflinian moment. We can note that at this point that Cézanne in his paintings transcends the clear boundaries of form. Creating a self‐generating, almost hermetically closed art, Cézanne, according the German critic, can easily be seen, and indeed has been considered a “Klexenmacher […] mit Löschpapiereffekten”26, an artist of blotches, of spegazzoni, a term we encountered earlier with Boschini.27 The anamorphosis between reality and image that is apparently at work in the paintings of Cézanne, could then be considered grotesque. However, between 1904 and 1907, Meier‐Graefe seems to have developed a better understanding of Cézanne’s use of these Klexe, or blotches. Whereas it seems that in 1904 he Meier‐Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte (1904), 165. Meier‐Graefe, Impressionisten, 184. 26 Meier‐Graefe, Impressionisten, 176. 27 Sohm, Pittoresco, 140‐141. 24 25 10 considers him tending towards a certain kind of formlessness, he has moved his position ever so slightly to acknowledge that even though much of that can be seen in Cézanne, it is only to the untrained eye that his genius will be hidden. Indeed, Cézanne’s painterliness has become a highly differentiated form of painterliness: “Cézanne führt alle Erscheinung auf Farben und Ton‐Differenzen zurück.” 28 This is, I would argue, a sign of the difficulty that Cézanne keeps on posing for Meier‐Graefe. I would go as far as contending that Meier‐Graefe remains somewhat like those visitors he is describing at the beginning of his 1907 essay, that start bursting into unintelligible, animal like sounds after looking at Cézanne’s paintings for a while. Meier‐Graefe’s argument and language, and this points towards a larger epistemological problem, fail at accounting for the dynamics of Cézanne’s painting. Locating the malerisch of Cézanne in his color allows Meier‐Graefe to somewhat disregard the problem of the fragmentary mentioned earlier. When he says that Cézanne extends the formal beyond the image, then he does indeed, in my view, allow for the grotesque reading of Cézanne to stand, especially if we remind ourselves of the fact that the grotesque is a form of the ornamental, an attribute that Meier‐Graefe repeatedly uses when talking about Cézanne’s paintings, and as such is correlative to the linear style. Meier‐Graefe does not seem to be able to productively resolve the tension, but rather sides with a notion of the malerisch that prefers color as the locus for malerisch to play itself out. What this can be boiled down to is the inability that we already found in Boschini and Wölfflin to adequately describe in any systematic fashion the malerisch qualities of painting. Even though Meier‐Graefe uses a parallel with literature, comparing Cézanne’s paintings to the fragmentary nature of Dostoyesky’s novels, the structural similarities between the two remain somewhat elusive and do not provide for a sustainable metaphor. Eventually, Meier‐Graefe has to acknowledge the illegibility of Cézanne’s paintings, by which I mean an almost Schillerian naïveté, as expressed in following sentence: 28 Meier‐Graefe, Impressionisten, 183. 11 Selten wie alles an ihm sind die Bruchstücke, die der Versuch einer kunstgeschichtlichen Analyse seiner Malerei zu Tage fördert. Er weist uns auf die am wenigsten bekannten Meister, auf einen zumal, der in aller Mund ist, ohne dass es bisher gelang, seine chamäleonartige Persönlichkeit klar darzustellen, Tintoretto.29 Meier‐Graefe frames Cézanne as a mystic, as we have seen before. And yet he is able to retrieve a genealogy, or tradition as he likes to put it, for Cézanne. That tradition brings us back, Meier‐Graefe wants us to believe, to Tintoretto, the ultimate Venetian hero of no less then Boschini in his vindication of pittoresco. It remains unclear then, whether what he have to deal with here is a transhistorical phenomenon, i.e. basically an ahistorical phenomenon, or whether there is any historical specificity to Cézanne that cannot solely be accounted for by his individuality. Indeed, it might be the case that Cézanne is an artist that stands outside the developmental history that Meier‐Graefe is outlining, by virtue of his painterliness. Rilke / Cézanne At this point, I would like to finally turn our attention to Rainer Maria Rilke, and his letters from 1907. I have already mentioned the letters’ literary intent in my introduction, but Rilke goes much beyond that and develops his own art historical reading of Cézanne’s work. He almost writes a little monograph on Cézanne, filling in a substantial amount of biographical information, with technical analysis, as well as elaborate ekphrasis that turns at times into full‐ blown prose poetry, a switch that we will look at in a moment and close our argument with. There is much to be said about the letters, and Köhnen has provided us with an in depth analysis of the intermediality that permeates Rilke’s writings in response to his exposure to Cézanne.30 Köhnen barely acknowledges Meier‐ Graefe’s influence however, and in what follows, I shall try to focus on this and in particular, as already mentioned, on the notion of malerisch color. 29 30 Meier‐Graefe, Impressionisten, 188. Köhnen, Sehen als Textkultur. 12 It seems that Rilke has understood from the outset that with Cézanne, it is exactly the conceptual, linguistic void that matters, and that it is to be celebrated as a form of formal purity. This also marks an important shift in his own art critical education, as we can glimpse from his stance on some Rodin drawings he describes in one of the letters: Ihre Deutung und Deutbarkeit störte mich, beschränkte mich gerade wie sie mir sonst allerhand Weite zu eröffnen schien. Ich hätte sie so gewünscht, ohne alle Aussprache, diskreter, tatsächlicher, allein gelassen mit sich selbst.31 Rilke’s view of Cézanne comes with a twist of objectivity then and is certainly along the lines of Meier‐Graeffian medium specificity and forms talking for themselves, about themselves rather then being adorned with explicative swirls. At this point, we will have to turn briefly to a quote by Cézanne, cited by Emile Bernard, which Meier‐Graefe reproduces in his 1907 book, and that Rilke will also have been familiar with from his own reading of Bernard’s writings on Cézanne: Il n’ya pas de ligne, il n’y a pas de modelé, il n’y a que des contrastes. Ces contrastes, ce ne sont pas le noir et le blanc qui les donnent; c’est la sensation colorée. […] Du rapport exact des tons résulte le modelé. Quand ils sont harmonieusement juxtaposés et qu’ils y sont tous, le tableau se modèle tout seul. – On ne devrait pas dire m o d e l e r, on devrait dire m o d u l e r. – Le dessin et la couleur ne sont point distinct, au fur et à mesure que l’on peint on dessine; plus la couleur s’harmonise, plus le dessin se précise. Quand la couleur est à sa richesse, la forme est à sa plénitude.32 Rilke, quite obviously takes his cue from this passage when he writes: Ich wollte aber eigentlich noch von Cézanne sagen: dass es niemals noch so aufgezeigt worden ist, wie sehr das Malen unter den Farben vor sich geht, wie man sie ganz allein lassen muss, damit sie sich gegenseitig auseinandersetzen. Ihr Verkehr untereinander: das ist die ganze Malerei. Wer dazwischen spricht … trübt schon Ihre Handlung. Der Maler dürfte nicht zum Bewusstsein seiner Einsichten kommen (wie der Künstler überhaupt): ohne den Umweg durch seine Reflexion zu nehmen, müssen seine Fortschritte, ihm selber rätselhaft, so rasch in die Arbeit eintreten, dass er sie in dem Moment ihres Übertritts nicht zu erkennen vermag.33 Rilke, Briefe, 31, letter from 10/15/07. Meier‐Graefe, Impressionisten, 183. 33 Rilke, Briefe, 40‐41, letter from 10/21/07. 31 32 13 The last bit of this quote, which goes to the heart of our questions about a malerisch subjectivity, recalls Rilke’s reaction to Rodin’s drawings, inasmuch as he calls for an almost mindless process, that is pure work, a notion that he draws on repeatedly in the letters: Diese Arbeit […] die so unbestechlich Seiendes auf seinen Farbeninhalt zusammenzog, dass es in einem Jenseits von Farbe eine neue Existenz, ohne frühere Erinnerungen, anfing. Es ist diese unbegrenzte, alle Einmischung in eine fremde Einheit ablehnende Sachlichkeit, die den Leuten die Portraits Cézannes so anstößig und komisch macht.34 Echoing Meier‐Graefe’s descriptions of reactions of exhibition goers and his attempts at putting Cézanne into some sort of tradition, this quote and the one before furthermore hint at the painting becoming a complex coloristic expanse, neutral and in equilibrium. It is as if the paintings surface turns into a field in which the different colors become the actors, playing out their own stories. Rilke creates the impression of the painting becoming a living surface that rather then allowing for the viewer to see through it, as in a Renaissance perspective, engages him by positing a specific kind of reciprocity and mutual penetration: Das Anschauen ist eine so wunderbare Sache, von der wir so wenig wissen; wir sind mit ihm ganz nach außen gekehrt; aber gerade wenn wir’s am meisten sind, scheinen in uns Dinge vor sich zu gehen, die auf das Unbeobachtetsein sehnsüchtig gewartet haben, und während sie sich, intakt und seltsam anonym, in uns vollziehen, ohne uns, ‐ wächst in dem Gegenstand draußen ihre Bedeutung heran.35 At the same time as there seems to be mutual penetration, there also seems to be a moment of anonymity or mindlessness, as I put it earlier, both for the viewing subject, as well as the painter. The object however, seems to growing at the same time. This is, in a certain way, an explication of the Wölfflinian paradox I had pointed out earlier, in which color somewhat mysteriously moves forward from some imaginary depths. The mechanism described in both Rilke and Wölfflin it seems is one of transfer of interiority, which then becomes the carrier of meaning per se. The physical object of the painting becomes then a surface that 34 35 Rilke, Briefe, 36, letter from 10/18/07. Rilke to Clara Rilke in a letter from 3/8/07 quoted in Köhnen, Sehen als Textkultur, 113. 14 is in many ways all eye ‐ an eye however that is not as much a window into a space beyond, but an eye that is the subject of its own education and growth. I want to conclude this section then with a last quote from Rilke, in which he transgresses and transposes what he considers malerisch in Cézanne into his own project. Color plays a crucial role: Aber der Morgen hell. Ein breiter Ostwind, der mit entwickelter Fronte hereinkommt über die Stadt, da er sie so geräumig findet. Gegenüber, westlich, angeweht, hinausgedrängt, Archipels von Wolken, Inselgruppen, grau wie die Halsfedern und die Brust von Wasservögeln in einem Ozean kalten Kaumblaus von zu entfernter Seligkeit. Und unter dem allem hin, niedrig, immer noch die Place de la Concorde und die Bäume der Champs‐Elysees, schattig, von zu Grün vereinfachtem Schwarz, und den Westwolken. Rechtshin helle Häuser, sonnig angeweht, und ganz im Hintergrund in blauem Taubengrau nochmals Häuser, in Plans geschlossen, mit steinbruchhaften, gradlinig abgesetzten Flächen.36 Here, we have now perhaps reached a textual form that, in its paratactic and associative impetus, is as close as it gets to create in literary form the patchwork of colored planes or, with Rilke, the quarry of truncated expanses that in his eyes seem to be the quintessence of malerisch. Of course, Rilke is no art historian, and he is not bound by any claims to a transparent, legible language. And yet, even in this excerpt, he gives clues as to a possible conceptualization of malerisch, which could be best described perhaps as a syntax of planes. Conclusion In concluding, let us then remind ourselves of the long and complicated history of the notion of malerisch or painterliness that had its origin in 17th century Venice, and found a modern echo in the writings of art historians Wölfflin and Meier‐Graefe, who, as I have shown, had a similar understanding of the concept, but arrived at it from slightly different angles. Rainer Maria Rilke, eventually, with his license as poet, tries to fulfill the promise of a transmedial malerisch, a promise that the other authors would only be able to formulate with metaphors of patches, blotches, or somewhat unraveling pieces of fabric, standing in for the fragment in search of a whole. 36 Rilke, Briefe, 34, letter from 10/17/07. 15 Malerisch modernism is then also, as I have hopefully been able to at least lay out in some rudimentary form, a moment in the history of art where it reflects on its own being, and more importantly, on the essence of the different arts. It is a quintessential ontological enterprise, echoing larger concerns of the modern era of the role of the subject and its relation to the masses. By looking at Meier‐Graefe and Rilke, I hope to have made it clear that language was not going to be enough to formulate this ontology. Malerisch and language or shall we say – to bring us full circle back to Meier‐Graefe’s opening of Entwicklungsgeschichte – expansion and line are and continue to be in an unresolved tension. The patchwork subject that I hope I was able to summon here is the correlative of this ongoing movement. ~ 5500 words 16 Works consulted: Engel, Manfred, ed., Rilke Handbuch – Leben – Werk – Wirkung. Stuttgart and Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2004. Köhnen, Ralph. Sehen als Textkultur – Intermediale Beziehungen zwischen Rilke und Cézanne. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 1995. Meier‐Graefe, Julius. Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst. Munich: Piper & Co. Verlag, 1904. Meier‐Graefe, Julius. Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst. Munich: Piper & Co. Verlag, 1920. Meier‐Graefe, Julius. Impressionisten: Guys – Manet – van Gogh – Pissarro – Cézanne. Munich and Leipzig: Piper & Co. Verlag, 1907. Meier‐Graefe, Julius. Kunst ist nicht für Kunstgeschichte da – Briefe und Dokumente. Edited and commentary by Catherine Kramer. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2001. Moffet, Kenworth. Meier‐Graefe as art critic. Munich: Prestel‐Verlag, 1973. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Briefe über Cézanne. Edited by Clara Rilke. Wiesbaden: Insel‐ Verlag, 1952. Sohm, Philip. Pittoresco – Marco Boschini, his critics, and their critiques of painterly brushwork in seventeenth‐ and eighteenth century Italy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Stevens, Adrian and Fred Wagner, eds. Rilke und die Moderne. Munich: Iudicium, 2001. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe – Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst. Munich: F. Bruckmann KG, 1915. 17