Letters on Cézanne

"I found Rilke inspirational, because he talks about painting in a really extraordinary way. Cézanne himself said that ‘talking about art is almost useless’. Art is a visual thing, and writing is not: the two are very different. And yet, Rilke somehow is able to express in words the way Cézanne’s paintings made him understand the world. Rilke writes as if his eyes have just opened, as if he has only just seen Cézanne’s work; and it renews his vision, and he suddenly sees everything differently. He takes a walk in Paris, and recognizes Cezanne’s colours in the streets. There are a very few people who can write about painting well. Take the example of colours. Dust, dandelion, butter, hay, lemon, mustard. All these words conjure up different kinds of yellow. If you say to a child ‘paint yellow’, they’ll probably just take the yellow they got in front of them and use that. But if you say, ‘paint the colour of the inside of a banana’, they are likely to choose a different shade of yellow, or think about what they see in their head. Rilke has managed to pin down the colours he sees in Cézanne’s work, and to express and explain them really precisely, and for that, I’m very grateful to him. In fact, if you go down to the South of France you recognize Cézanne’s landscapes as he depicts it in his paintings, and also see it in Rilke’s descriptions. “Rilke writes as if his eyes have just opened, as if he has only just seen Cézanne’s work; and it renews his vision, and he suddenly sees everything differently. ” But Cézanne wasn’t working with tone anything like as much as Vermeer. He was working with colour instead, and used it to express form, and to express depth; and that is what Rilke responded to. If you’re a painter, I believe you have to think in those terms. That’s why Rilke is a great writer on art: somehow, he is able to write in those terms and his words make you feel the way you do when you look at great painting. You might not quite remember the colours, or the composition, but when you read Rilke you remember how it felt to see a masterpiece. In the end, no matter how you analyze painting, you can only go so far. You can try to find out about the studio method of a great master like Vermeer, but there is something that will always be out of reach. We can see what pigments he used, what order in which he put the paint on, even make guesses about how he could have used a camera obscura ; but we will never know what made him make the choices he did. As Georges Braque said in the twentieth century ‘you can explain everything about a painting, except the bit which matters’. Maybe that is the definition of genius."