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
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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 –
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Moffet, Kenworth. Meier‐Graefe as art critic. Munich: Prestel‐Verlag, 1973.
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Verlag, 1952.
Sohm, Philip. Pittoresco – Marco Boschini, his critics, and their critiques of
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Stevens, Adrian and Fred Wagner, eds. Rilke und die Moderne. Munich: Iudicium,
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Wölfflin, Heinrich. Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe – Das Problem der
Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst. Munich: F. Bruckmann KG, 1915.
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