Letters to a Young Painter

"Letters to a Young Poet I think will always remain the more obviously inspiring volume because it seems to me it’s much more self-conscious. You get the sense that there’s an awareness of those letters as a sort of manual for artistic achievement and creativity for a large audience. What I like about the Balthus letters is their super personal tone. In 1919 Rilke was reunited with an old friend Baladine Klossowska, a Polish-born artist who was living on her own with her two sons Pierre and Balthasar. It was Rilke that coined the nickname for Balthus, a precocious artist. And maybe for the first time in his life, Rilke took on the role of father and mentor to his adoptive family. The household included a cat, an Angora stray named Mitsou, which ran away. In his distress, the 14-year-old Balthus drew a series of illustrations that begins with him finding the cat on a park bench and ends with him in tears. “Letters can be particularly illuminating as a prism for the visual culture of a time” Rilke was so impressed by his protégé’s work that he arranged to have the drawings published with a preface he wrote himself. They co-authored this volume, and that’s how years of correspondence began. Rilke’s standing assured that the volume got its due, collecting royalties and making sure that the publisher was doing the work that he was supposed to. Over time, his correspondence to Balthus essentially became a series of birthday letters, eight letters in total from the ages of 14 to 18. They feel really warm and compassionate, and not performative at all. There’s this great sympathy, compassion, love, and support for this child that on some level he need not have any concrete connection to. Rilke died soon after writing the last of those letters. He was moved to make this connection by a young person in his life who was not his own child but someone else’s, his protégé, and someone he wanted to inspire with his words. And so, there’s an incredible way in which, at the end of his life, Rilke seems to have really understood what human beings need in order to be encouraged, to feel encouraged. His experience working as Rodin’s secretary was bittersweet. He learned a lot, but he maybe took some of Rodin’s advice too closely to heart. It was only later that Rilke realised that Rodin engaged actively in “extracurricular indulgences.” As Rilke gets older and wiser, he becomes aware that the personal is as important as the productive, if not more so. In these endearing letters to Balthus, what we have is more like a window into a relationship as opposed to a kind of self-help guide. Letters to a Young Poet has arguably become a kind of “how-to” manual for every creative adolescent in the world. I like that these letters to Balthus by contrast have a kind of off-the-beaten path intimacy."