Letters on Cézanne

Letters on Cézanne

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<p><b>Rilke's prayerful responses to the french master's beseeching art</b></p><p><i>For a long time nothing, and then suddenly one has the right eyes.</i></p><p>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.</p><p>Rilke was knowledgeable about art and had even published monographs, including a famous study of Rodin that inspired his <i>New Poems</i>. 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, <i>The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge</i>. <i>Letters on Cezanne</i> is a collection of meaningfully private responses to a radically new art.</p>