Paul Cezanne Letters to Emile Bernard & Rainer Maria Rilke from Letters on Cezanne

The first reading is a selection of excerpts from letters that Cezanne sent to Bernard in his later years.  In them, Cezanne emphasizes the importance of painters learning from nature.  He is also not very subtle about his dislike/disinterest in talking about or criticizing art, seeming to give Bernard forceful hints that he doesn't think much of his writing about art.  He makes the observation that a writer works in abstractions whereas a painter "gives concrete form to his sensations and perceptions" (34).  

The second reading is a selection of excerpts from letters that Rilke wrote to his wife about Cezanne.  These letters are Rilke's response to seeing an exhibit of Cezanne's work in Paris in 1907.  In his first letter, Rilke makes the telling observation that in museums he is always more interested in the people wandering around than the paintings themselves, that is, except for in the Cezanne room.  He goes on to discuss some of Cezanne's life and technique in his work and finally goes into an in depth study of one of Cezanne's paintings (pictured below) in one of the final letters.  His most beautiful prose reflects on Cezanne's use of color and how in each of the main colors of the painting, there are many different shades acting and reacting against other shades and colors so that the image seems almost to be quivering with movement.      

Paul Cezanne, Madame Cezanne in a Red Armchair, 1877

 "Everything, as I already wrote, has become an affair that's settled among the colors themselves: a color will come into its own in response to another, or assert itself, or recollect itself...In this hither and back of mutual and manifold influence, the interior of the picture vibrates, rises and falls back into itself, and does not have a single unmoving part" (39).