Chapter 7. The Sight of the New: Rilke and Modern Art (1898-1926)

(9 September 2025)

(8 586 words)

(Reading Time = 45 minutes)

Poet or painter? The question remained in the mind of Rilke at least until 1900. Certainly, choosing the latter would have meant art criticism or art curating, and not portrait painting. We have many instances of his youthful attempts at poetry; we have none of his youthful attempts at painting. But it was an option. At perhaps the lowest point in his career, in the winter of 1902, as a newly married husband and father of a young child, living in rural Westerwede, Rilke wrote one letter after another to patrons in the art world seeking to place himself with art galleries or museums. On 8 January, he contacted Gustav Pauli, the director of the Bremen art museum, in a letter in which Rilke plaintively outlined his straightened circumstances and their possible effects on his writing (and hinted at the dire consequences of continuing unemployment for his family), before coming to the crux of the matter: “I wonder if in Bremen, where as a stranger I have found such a kind and trusting reception, there might be some position in which I could prove myself useful. Doesn’t enlarging the art museum necessitate expanding its personnel?” We do not know if it does or does not. Rilke neither. There was no reponse.

It was four years earlier that Rilke had made his first attempts to enter the otherwise closed world of Munich art circles. Rilke had moved here from Prague in 1897, precisely to increase his opportunities for a broader reception of his work. He certainly achieved this along personal professional lines, adding significant names such as Jakob Wassermann and Max Halbe to his coterie of friends and supporters. Little, however, was written that might establish his credentials amongst the professional fine art community. Two short pieces, “Munich Letter on Art” (“Münchener Kunstbrief”) and “A further Munich Letter” (“Auch ein Münchener Brief”), written between August and September 1897, were left unpublished. Things changed the following year when, following his trip to Florence, and now living in Berlin, Rilke began the promote himself as an art critic. Between October and December 1898, he succeeded in publishing a series of articles devoted to contemporary art. They appeared mostly in small journals but one, “Salon of Three ” (“Salon der Drei”) appeared in the December edition of the weighty Der Neue Rundschau. The salon refers to a small gallery occupied by Paul Cassirer and his cousin Bruno on the ground floor of their house near the Englis Garden. Here they were able to exhibit three artists whom they felt represented modern art. Rilke was a regular visitor and wrote a short review of one such exhibition where the paintings of Degas and Max Liebermann were shown in conjunction with the sculptures of Constatin Meunier. Rilke’s words are celebratory: the three artists gain in this combination, each reflecting the quality of the new that is their collective identity (v: 452).

Rilke did not only write about the mainstream contemporary European art; he also, following his trips to Russia in 1898 and 1900, put his admiration for Russian art, particularly that which drew upon the tradition of icon making, into words, in essays such as “Trends in Modern Russian Art” (“Moderne Russische Kunstbestrebungen”, November 1902). Written prior to the dramatic emergence of Russian avant-garde art in Wasilav Kandinsky and Marc Chagall, Rilke returns to a theme that he had broached once before, in his essay “Russian Art (“Russische Kunst”); the ontological seriousness of Russian art, its inner engagement with the human condition, “heavy thoughts” (v: 613) as is evident in the work of the romantic nationalist, Viktor Vasnetsov (1848-1926). “His gaze elides gently over into sympathy, love and care, therefore over the purely pictorial into the content of life [‘das Thematische’ “, v: 614). Such artists seek to bring to life traditional forms (“his form is an inherited form”, v: 619), often, as in Sergei Malyutin (1859-1937), often with affinities t othe Arts and Carfts Movement, whose work combines peasant motifs with religious iconography. To ask for “development” here is to misunderstand the universal nature of Russian art.

The two Russian essays were the art-critical fruit of his experience of that country. Rilke knew how to respond to the many environments in which he lived or visited and extract the deepest cultural resonance from them, and what he drew out of Russia provided the pattern for France, Italy and Spain. To enrich his understanding of art, Rilke, did not however, need to venture into distant climes. Towards the end of 1900 (immediately after his second Russia trip), Rilke went to stay at the artists’ colony in Worpswede in rural Lower Saxony. where had been invited by a Heinrich Vogeler, whom he had met in Florence in 1887. Rilke established a bond with the members of that community, particularly with two female artists, Paul Becker and Clara Westhoff, at the same time as he deepened his friendship with Vogeler. Rilke wrote not one but two essay’s celebrating the latter’s work.

Vogeler took as his subject matter not only the austere and atmospheric landscape that surrounded him in Worpswede, but also images and tropes from Germanys medieval past, depicting knights of chivalry and wistful (indeed, melancholy) meditative maidens (in the mode of the Pre-Raphaelites), which were often framed in the same landscape. His “On the Edge of the Heath” (“Am Heiderand”, 1900) figures a solitary martial figure astride a horse facing a barren tree. Both tree and knight are figures of loneliness (a recurring trope in Vogeler’s work), and for Rilke, viewing the painting, the very starkness of this meeting had existential implications (existential in not only being in the world but thereby being confronted by choices (“Entscheidung” in Heidegger’s words, possibly moments or modes of action) that define the self. In his poem, “Knight, World and Heath” (“Ritter, Welt und Heide”), Rilke sought to draw out these implications. Its initial stanzas read:

I

As if it is being borne along by dark voices

the heath opens out in front of the knight.

And he halts, and hears his heart beating,

beating at the doors of new days

which, as yet, he can barely comprehend.

Of days that are vast, too vast to ride around

and of destinations than can only be reached in dreams.

Suddenly the world is played for him

by a thousand hands upon a thousand strings.

II

All things are but two: living and not-being.

But how many things are found therein!

Living means: to become the face for blind things,

now transfigured, now in tears,

to set oneself in motion for the unmoveable,

to step out for the root-bound,

and all the while giving the lead to that which errs,

and to understand that which has no voice.

III

Dying means: to ride out on black earth,

to bear arms that lie gleaming to hand,

on a weighty horse to make a weighty gesture

under the black iron suit …

to awaken mother earth with this gesture

and to hide oneself in her warm arms

(in the roots there is just enough space)

and – to stretch forthe a tree from the heart,

a red tree,

its branches willowing:

that is death.

I

[Wie von dunklen Stimmen getragen,

hebt vor dem Ritter die Heide an.

Und er hält, und sein Herz hört er schlagen,

schlagen an Türen von neuen Tagen,

die er kaum noch begreifen kann.

Von Tagen, die weit sind und nicht zu umreiten,

und Zielen die man im Traum nur erzielt;

von tausend Händen auf tausend Saiten

wird ihm auf einmal die Welt gespielt.

II

Zwei sind der Dinge nur: Leben und Nichtsein;

aber wie vieles ist damit gemeint!

Leben heißt: blinden Dingen Gesicht sein,

einmal verklärt und einmal verweint.

Für das Unbewegte sich rühren,

für das Wurzelgebundene gehn,

all es immer Irrende führen

und das viel zu Stumme verstehen.]

III

Sterben heißt: reiten auf schwarzer Erde,

Waffen tragen, die glänzend ruhn,

auf schweren Pferd eine schwere Gebärde,

unter dem dunklen Eisen tun …

Mit dieser Gebärde die Mutter wecken wecken

und sich in warmen Armen verstecken –

(In den Wurzeln ist grade Raum)

und – einen Baum aus dem Herzen strecken,

einen roten,

rauschenden Baum:

so ist der Tod.]

Written in three stanzas, with a variable rhyming scheme and line lengths, Vogeler’s painting says little. It consists of an entirely static account of a man facing nature (a solitary tree). The colours are sombre. Nothing presses; nothing threatens. And yet this is exactly the threat, which emerges from an emptiness, from, in terms of artistic communication, the not-said. These are the metaphorical “dark voices” (line 1, the landscape itself is a literal white). The painting (and Rilke’s poem) catches the knight at a moment of decision. He is compelled to confront days that he cannot avoid. It is a confrontation that will, however, open up the world as a space of freedom (“Suddenly the world is played for him / by a thousand hands upon a thousand strings”), which will take him beyond the stasis that frames (and delimits) him.

That the ultimate destination may be (indeed, must be) death is made clear in the third stanza, but death pales into insignificance when compared to “Nichtsein” (line 10), which is a death-in-life, the termination of (authentic) being, the failure of courage, dishonour, duty. The poem makes no explicit note to the code of chivalry that the knight has willingly taken upon himself, but the reference to “blind things” points us in the direction of this residual code. It is a code that motivates the knight to move the unmoveable, to rectify the ever errant and to understand that which seeks to remain silent.

Vogeler’s painting (this particular painting but his painting as a genre) took its strength from an affinity with is local landscape and the nature of Worpswede in general. Rilke’s poem correspondingly utilises natural imagery in its thematizing of the drama of choice and duty facing the knight. The heath (line 1) provides the mise en scene, a levelling of ground, that represents the choices in the world that he must make and thus escape the “rootbound” (line 15), that which does not to locate us deeply in the soil but that which hinders our attempts to move forward. Riding on “black earth” (line 18) is to ride on and into the valley of death, the latter represented finally (line 26) by the red tree, the colour of blood and the symbol of self-sacrifice.

Rilke was close friends with Heinrich Vogeler, it was, however, for the two female artists, Paula and Clara, that Rilke felt the greatest affection. Rilke married Clara in 1901 but it was with the former that (in the words of one commentator), an “amitié amourese” (Lloyd p. 7) arose. As “the blond painter”, she appears repeatedly in his diary entries and he wrote a number of poems to her and about her, which he included in his dairy. Rilke was fully of where his tur feelings lay. As Rilke noted in his diary on 10 September, he was taken by both women but,

particularly with the blond female painter [Paula – Clara was a sculptress], I found yet again how her eyes, whose dark centres were so smooth and solid, when fully developed opened up exactly like roses in full bloom, soft and warm, and contained gentle shadows and delicate hues as on the frame and breast of tiny backward receding skins of leaves”. The aesthetic here is not far from the erotic.

Rilke stayed in touch with Paula even after her marriage to Otto Modersohn, a fellow artist in the Worpswede colony. She had visited Paris with Clara in 1898 and returned again in 1905 (hoping to be able to submit her work to the “Salon des Independents”). Rilke had been living in Paris since 1903, and it was here that they now regained contact. It was a period that saw her realise the potential for original work that was only partially revealed in Worpswede. Rike was impressed by the development that she had made, which was towards a more expressive (indeed Expressionist use of colour and brush stroke) and a greater self-revelatory integrity in paintings that included self-portraits in the nude (such as “Self-Portrait on her Sixth Wedding Day, in 1906”, a unique act of artistic exploration for, at that time, a female painter). As Rilke wrote at the time, Paula was “developing her painting in a way all of her own, recklessly and straightforwardly, painting things that are very Worpswedish and yet that no one before gas ever been able to see and paint. And on this vey idiosyncratic path, strangely close to Van Gogh and his artistic direction” (letter to Karl von der Heydt, 16 January 1906).

In 1907, Modersohn-Becker died following the birth of her child. Two years later, Rilke wrote “Requiem for a Friend” (“Freundin” in the German title), in which he greeted her return from the dead as a revenant. She comes back not just in his mind, as a memory, but as a material reality, as the plenitude of absence. “Requiem” possesses a complex stanzaic structure. Technically (in terms of its typography) it consists only of four stanzas, the space between them signified by white space. Yet, within these stanzas, there are indented sections (in the manner of paragraphs), where clearly a break in the discourse of the poem is being signalled. This form seems to have been carefully chosen to support the development of a narrative (around the visitation of Paula and the lyrical subject’s involved response to that), with its frequent modulations in perspective and tone. The poem enacts the elaborate logic of a disquisitio. Questions are asked (of self and the visitant) but often left unanswered, statements made and then modified, impatient queries made (or imagined), past experiences (what has been learnt or not learnt) adduced without resolution, in lines where the dead seek to persuade the living, and all is presented in a grammatically terse form largely without subordinating clauses as one phrase moves, in an often-agitated fashion, into a further phrase. Such formal configurations seem to mirror an attempt to understand.

“Requiem” enacts the process of an interrogation of an absent subject (but one who “is” now present), in a questioning process that that is continuously interrupted by self-questioning. The rhetorical and emotive pull of the poem is generated through this dialectic. There is no consistent end rhyme or metre. The latter, although largely dactylic is frequently broken with chiasmi and angular punctuation, which effectively turns the feet into spondees, producing the effect of breathless assertion in the face of challenging scrutability.

Rilke was a convinced spiritualist. In letter written in 1904, he had asserted, “I believe that nothing that is real can pass away” (Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 145). As he later explained to the Princess Thurn und Taxis in December 1913, “I am willing to give ear to any spirit if it has to expand and needs to break into my life” (Rilke, Selected Letters 236), and in a diary entry for 14 December 1900 [Worpswede diary], he wrote: “sometimes I remember, in exact detail, things and epochs that never existed. I see every gesture of people who never lived a life and feel the swaying cadence of their never-spoken works. And a never-smiled smiling shines. Those who were never born die”. “Perhaps I’m remembering distant futures when what never existed rises up in me and speaks”.

The poem opens with an apodictic statement, which then develops into a dialogue: ” I have had dead ones, and I let them go” (“Ich habe Tote, und ich ließ sie hin”). The opening words draw a line over the departed souls that Rilke (and the autobiographical parallels are clear) has known, but he does not draw that line for Paula, although it is difficult to know, here as elsewhere in the poem, to what extent the poetic persona (Rilke) has willed Paula into existence. His attitude to her throughout is a vacillating one that prevents any clear contours from forming around her personality. Indeed, in spite of the many references to the tactile nature of her invoked presence, Paula remains a spectral figure throughout the poem. As Marielle Sutherland has noted, “the poetic voice roams desperately and restlessly (ghostlike in itself) around the irregular lines of the requiem poem, faltering in its faith in its own images of absence and concealment” (Sutherland p. 133): This is the result, possibly, of the endemic mystery inherent in receiving a revenant or, on a biographical level, something that reflects, perhaps, his vacillating attitude to Paula during her life, to a loved-one who was married to someone else. and to someone of whose art he was not sufficiently appreciative and to which Rilke “had been ambivalent, unhelpful, distant” (Gass 124). It is possible that “as with most apparitions, guilt is the ghost that walks within the Requiem” (Gass 124). Rilke leaves behind the other dead that he has known in the past:

You alone, you come back:

you brush against me, you move around, you want

to bump up against something so that it makes a sound

and discloses you.

[Nur du, du kehrst

zurück; du streifst mich, du gehst um, du willst

an etwas stoßen, daß es klingt von dir

und dich verrät.]

Paula is not a ghost, immaterial, a mere spectral substance. On the contrary, she is physical, has a material form. She moves around with disconcerting tactility and agility (the short section includes three verbs of motion), which betray her “living” presence, the tangibility of her existence being foregrounded by the repeated address of “du” and by the short phrasing (“du striefst”, “du gehst”, “du willst”), which creates a sense of the immediacy of a willing subject. Paula is more real than the objects that surround her, in the world of the familiar “thing”:

We turn this around;

it is no longer here. We mirror it into us

out of our being as soon as we find it.

[Wir wandeln dieses um;

es ist nicht hier, wir spiegeln es herein

aus unserm Sein’] (i: 647)

Spectres should be intangible; objects should be tangible, but Rilke reverses this equation. We can transform the external world, turning the outer inwards and the inner outwards, a fusing of positions that is formally reflected in the prepositions of the final lines where “aus” and “hinein” have effectively become coterminous. Paula is here, but why is she here? In the lines that follow, Rilke asks why she has returned to a world that is second-rate, “where everything is not yet” (“wo alles noch nicht ist“) (i: 647), an “ist” that looks forward later in the text to the “ist” that is the reality achieved in Paula’s paintings (i: 649). The speaking subject finds her amiss for having done so, for not being happy with eternity. This is an upbraiding, a note of frustrated criticism, and characterises a voice that moves throughout the poem between admonition and quizzicality “I believed you to be much further along. It confuses me” (“I thought that you had gone much further. This confuses me” / “ich glaubte dich viel weiter. Mich verwirrts”), through to grief and finally his acceptance of her death,

But Paula is not content simply to be with Rilke; she is seeking, in the form of a plea (“du bittest”), some explanation from him:

And if only I could say that you are just resting,

that you come out of generousity, out of a spillling over,

because you are so certain, so secure in yourself,

that you wander around like a child, unafraid

of places where someone might do you harm –

But no: you are pleading. That cuts me

to the bone and goes through me like a saw.

[Und dürft ich sagen, daß du mir nur geruhst,

daß du aus Großmut kommst, aus Uberfülle,

weil du so sicher bist, so in der selbst,

daß du herumgehst wie ein Kind, nicht bange

vor Ortern, wie man einem tut – :

doch nein: du bittest. Dieses geht mir so

bis ins Gebein und querrt wie eine Säge].

Paula does not seek to ingratiate herself into this world through spectral means. She is not a ghost that we can look through. Rilke wishes to avoid all connotations of the traditional apparition that belongs to folklore. Paula is not otherworldly but terrestrial, and Rilke makes this clear through the two prefixes “Groß” and “Uber” that indicate a plenitude of personhood. She “pleads” with Rilke. Is this “bitten” a reflex of the poet’s bad conscience or simply the recognition of a plaintive disposition? As with so many of the short phrases in the poem, the words are semantically (if not grammatically) paratactic.

Paula was a painter who excelled in still-life paintings, in which she depicted inanimate objects, often fruit (“For that is what you understood: the ripened fruit / that you laid upon the scales before you / and weighed down with colour” / “Denn Das verstandest du: die vollen Früchte. Die legtest du auf Schalen vor dich hin / und wogst mit Farben”). When she fell pregnant, Paula too saw herself as the bearer of fruit, and represented herself thus in her work (and there is just a touch, intended or otherwise, of erotic jouissance in Rilke’s description of her):

And in the end, you saw yourself as fruit.

Took yourself out of your clothes, carried

yourself before the mirror, let yourself in

into your looking, which remained high above

and did not say: that is me, but that is.

[Und sahst dich selbst zuletzt wie ein Frucht,

nahmst dich heraus aus deinen Kleiden, trugst

dich vor den Spiegel, ließest dich hin ein

bis auf dein Schauen; das blieb groß davor

und sagte nicht: das bin ich; nein, dies ist.]

This is not simply a self-portrait but the depiction of a living reality: “that is me, but that is“. Paula has succeeded in merging self and world, a fact that is captured here by the trope of the mirror. The mirror was a key image, a “Grundproblematik”, in Rilke’s work (Bollnow 250), representing a unity of subject and object (the person that we are looking at in the mirror is ourselves). It is this unity that permits the lyrical voice to go beyond the simple “me” of the reflected image to posit an essentialist “is“:

I want to keep you as you presented

yourself to yourself in the mirror,

deep within and away from everything. Why now do you come differently?

[So will ich dich behalten; wie du dich

hinstelltest in den Spiegel; tief hinein

und fort von allem. Warum kommst du anders?]

The encounter transforms Rilke’s perception of Paula as he knew her (and they were putative lovers), and he now accepts the fact of her transformation in three short lines that voice the foundational tenet of the spiritualist credo:

Come here into the candlelight. I am not afraid

to look at the dead. If they come,

they have the right to put themselves into our gaze, like other things.

[Komm her ins Kerzenlicht. Ich bin nicht bang,

die Toten anzuschauen. Wenn sie kommen,

so haben sie ein Recht, in unserm Blick

sich aufzuhalten, wie die andern Dinge]

Rilke (or his persona) grasps the fact that Paula “is” present. He discerns that presence, but he cannot see her directly but only (like a blind person) indirectly through the sense of sight. The trope of the gaze (“Blick”) links the poet (narrating in language) with the artist Paula (painting on a canvas):

To understand that you are here. I understand.

Just as a blind man understands the things around him,

I feel your fate but do not know hoe to name it.

[Begreifen, daß du hier bist. Ich begreife.

Ganz wie ein Blinder rings ein Ding begreift,

fühle ich dein Los und weiß ihm keinen Namen.]

The lyrical subject likens himself to a blind man (“Blinder”). Rilke takes up the gaze motif once more reverses its import. The lack not the potency of sight now becomes the vehicle for the rapprochement with the deceased Paula, using a sense (“fühlen”, a verb that appears throughout the poem) that transcends the normal in order to make possible contact with the paranormal. As the tetx makes clear, this is the only effective form of understanding (“begreifen”).

I would like to throw my voice like a shawl

Over the shards of your death

and pull it until it tatters

and everything that I say would go so ragged

into this voice and freeze.

[Ich möchte meine Stimme wie ein Tuch

hinwerfen über deines Todes Scherben

und zerrn an ihr, bis sie in Fetzen geht,

und alles, was ich sage, müßte so,

zerlumpt in dieser Stimme gehn und frieren.]

The “Stimme” here is the voice of the poem. The poet would like to find words for the varied dimensions of Paula’s death (perhaps to describe them; perhaps to bring them into the realm of comprehensibly. But that is not possible. Language fails, and the poet’s words would simply freeze in the cold air of ithe mystery of death

Paula is and was a solitary figure, in death as in life, but this is the fate of artists. The artist belongs to life but only at a distance. To love also is to be alone (Rilke attests, broaching a subject that he will further explore in the Duino Elegies) because it is an absolute state that transcends the presence of the loved-one:

Women suffer: to love means to be alone,

and artists sometimes sense in their work

that where they love they have to transfigure.

You began both.

[Die Frauen leiden: lieben heißt allein sein,

und Künstler ahnen manchmal in der Arbeit,

daß sie verwandeln müssen, wo sie lieben.

Beides begannst du.]

We have been told that Paul died a woman’s death in childbirth (i: 653). Now Rilke qualifies that observation on female vulnerability into something that was, for Paula, capable of redemption, where “leiden”, and “allein sein” (both terms linked through alliteration) can be read as preconditions for transformation (“verwandeln”). The return of Paula, her visit to Rilke, is seen by the poet in the final lines as an opening to knowledge, as a path to self-understanding:

“Do not come back. If you can bear it

remain dead amongst the dead. The dead are preoccupied.

But help me in a way that does not distract you

as that which is furthest away sometimes helps me: in me”.

[Komm nicht zurück. Wenn du’s erträgst, so sei

tot bei den Toten. Tote sind beschäftigt.

Doch hilf mir so, daß ich dich nicht zerstreut,

wie mir das Fernste manchmal hilft: in mir.]

The poet’s image and memories of Paula should not dissolve. The distance between him and her is no obstacle to their union, because Rilke has fully internalised her death.

As is clear from “Requiem”, Rilke had finally discovered Paula Becker. After almost a decade of treating her largely as an archetype of anima femina, she is now not only recognised as a person but as an artist. When Rilke went to Worpswede in 1906 to view her latest work, he realised that Paula’s paintings were informed by the iconoclastic energies of modernist art, radical new energies that Rilke himself was only to discover after 1903 through his contact with Rodin and Cezanne, when he produced in his letters on the latter his most penetrating contribution to art criticism.

But before Cezanne came an artist whose work arrived like an eruption into Rilke’s assimilation of modern art: Vincent Van Gogh. It is not clear when Rilke first encountered the paintings of Van Gogh. We know from a letter sent to Calar from Capri in December 1906 that he was reading the letters of van Gogh (possibly in the edition edited by Margarete Mauthner and published by Bruno Cassirer that year), and which he found “unutterably earnest, unutterably moving, and for painters really like a good helpful voice”. It is also clear from the same letter that Rilke had seen Van Gogh’s paintings, which he likens to the exuberant colours that surround him in the scenery of Naples, the “earth-brown of the clay pitchers”, “the yellow of single lemons”, “the ever-turning red”. Once back in Paris, Rilke had further opportunity to view Van Gogh’s work, in the small salons and galleries, such as the Bernheim, that specialised in contemporary art. But van Gogh can be found even in The Louvre, in a collection bequeathed by the painter Etienne Moreau-Nelation. Van Gogh stands out from all others, he is “something else, something inexorably obsessed with expression, which bends painting to its will” (7 June 1907 to Clara).

In October, Rilke was leant a portfolio of forty prints of Van Gogh’s paintings by Mathilde Vollmoeller-Purmann (1865-1943, a noted painter of still lifes in the manner of Matisse, whose student she was), which she had recently brought back with her from Amsterdam. Rilke was impressed by Van Gogh’s agility to highlight his colours, to produce a “great radiance from within” (3 October to Clara). He depicts landscapes in which “figures are dispersed and set in motion, and things go on back behind them in the canvas, and it is somewhere in the beyond things are still happening quite gently in the external world” (2 October to Clara). Above all, Rilke is impressed by Van Gogh’s use of everyday objects (or, more accurately, there are no everyday objects for Van Gogh). Like Cezanne before him, he paints whatever he happens to find before him: pieces of fruit, old wine bottles, “and makes his ‘saints’ out of things like that, and compels them, compels them to be beautiful, to mean the whole world and all happiness and all glory” (letter to Clara 9 October).

Rilke was not unaware that such aesthetic transports were made possible by technical competence: the handling of colour, the configuration of space and the redrawing of the boundaries of perspective (Van Gogh in fact employed in certain paintings what was known as a “perspective frame”, which allowed him to convert 3D into 2D images. Rilke was not unarwe of cuh teniques but what took him deeply with Van Gogh was the energy of Van Gogh’s work, colours that dominate scenes, and integrated people in those scenes into colour. The people were colour. And when it was a matter of objects, particularly the objects of nature, such as sunflowers, they were depicted with a coloury intensity that elevated them to a human status. They had a life as real as the people he painted. The sunflower “is simply with all that has been made out of this and what lets itself be made”.

Within a matter of four years, between 1903 and 1907, three artists, Van Gogh, Rodin and Cezanne had transformed Rilke’s grasp of modern art, allowing him to move beyond the “Jugendstil” of the Worpswede colony and the autochthonic traditionalism of Russian art. His appropriation of modern art, and the at times bewildering developments in its various movements, was selective. In 1917, he decided not to attend the “Sturm” exhibition in Zurich in March / April 1917, although the annual exhibition of that Expressionist journal had become the showcase at least in the German-speaking world for modern art. By 1917, Rilke had, however, become sceptical about the inherent value of certain movements within modern art. The “Futurists” he dismissed as crude rejecters of the past, their own art “did not produce but simply deviated from tradition and, by making visible their transitory experiences of the moment through highhanded self-assertion, did not add anything to the Realism or Impressionism that they sought to distance themselves from”. Cubism, too, has not produced anything new but simply lays bare the subcutane net that lies under the structure of all art”.

Rilke’s path to contemporary art was thus not without obstacles. Rilke’s path had a history. In an earlier letter to Eliza Taubmann (18 May 1917), he explained why moving along this path had been so difficult: “after our meetings in Paris [xxx], I was completely absorbed only by Cézanne’s work. Later paintings, with the exception of a few by Henri Rousseau, did not claim my full attention, this was because, on the one hand, Cezanne still seemed to me the biggest and most modern artist, and because long journeys [to Spain, Egypt and North Africa] filled me with pictures and demands which, but for the war, I would have developed and worked up within myself. Only in the “exile” In which I live here [in Munich] did I begin, more out of desoeuvrement than receptivity, to look about me again, and here I began to get a feeling for Picasso” “Among the Germans, it was Franz Marc (who fell in the war0 who interested me particularly. If you ask me how I feel about these artists, I am really embarrassed to give an answer that would be useful and to the point”. “Directions and individuals of yesterday and today – no, I could not say how many of them are on the right track”. “I must assume that our experiences are shifting always further int the invisible, into the bacillary and the microscopic”.

In this miasma, there were, however, a small group of artists in this period who attracted Rilke’s unambiguous allegiance: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Franz Marc (1880-1916), Paul Klee (1879-1940) and Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980). These were harbingers of the new but were able to be new without abandoning what Rilke regarded as the necessary conditions of aesthetic “integrity”, drawing upon the “best of tradition”, they successfully “ordered their individual components into a total image [‘Bildganzen’]” and “achieved an equal status between all areas in the picture through an objective indifference to the things depicted” (letter to Elizabeth Taubmann 8 August 1917). Rilke mentions Picasso and Marc, but he was also drawn to the work of Oskar Kokoschka and Paul Klee. True, not all proved to be equally central to his writing. The only direct influence of Picasso former lay in a borrowing of his painting “Les Saltimbanques”, depicting a group of Parisien street performers, around whose gauche antics and vainglorious attempts at earthly transcendence Rilke would fashion his fifth Duino Elegy.

But “direct influence” is, perhaps, not the best way of framing Rilke’s engagement with these artists. All pursued a common trajectory in their work, which sought to push beyond the conventions of representationalism and the boundaries of familiar genres, and in doing so they worked up (through experimentation successful and non-successful, in their terms) their own distinct techniques and idiom. That Rilke should encounter these diverse but related idioms in the years prior to the completion of the Dunio Elegies is significant to our understanding of the ultimate configuration (both thematically and stylistically) of that work.

Rilke felt both exhilarated and confronted by the paintings of Kokoschka, where perspectives are pulled apart and often violently so in stark colours. Violence and disfiguration are recurring themes both in his paintings

Rilke had met Kokoschka n Berlin in 1910 and recognised in him a leading figure in the avant-garde, whose uncompromising pursuit of his own quite specific artistic goals (and in his own quite specific and often provocative idiom) reflected Rilke’s own. Within a short time, their friendship had reached a stage where they were sending each their latest work. In April 1916, Kokoschka sent Rilke a sketch “The Mount of Olives” (“Der Olberg). Rilke replied immediately with a poem just completed: “Cells of Hatred, strong in the greatest Circle of Love” (“Haßzellen, stark im größten Liebeskreise”). n 1909, Kokoshka wrote “Murderer, the Hope of Woman” (“Mörder, die Hoffnung der Frauen”) the first Expressionist drama of what might be regarded as a heightened version of the Strindbergian conflict of the sexes. The play is both visually and theatrically confronting, and draws upon a broad array of effects, lighting, costume and scenery in which language and dialogue give way to the movements of the body. Rilke’s poem also takes for its theme the fundamental division that he saw in all love relationships: the will to surrender to the other but at the same time possess even destroy (at least emotionally) the other. Rilke’s poem lacks the confronting physicality of Kokoschka’s plays but the terrains of emotion that it explores are dark ones.

The poem possesses seventeen quatrains (its length alone perhaps indicating the torturous process of love involvement), with iambic pentameters lines that are largely end-stopped, producing the effect of composed finality. “Cells of Hatred” is an inverted love poem, in which the lyrical subject flees to a distance beyond the antimonies of love and hate, attraction and repulsion, adoration and deprecation, and the many subtle layers between them of an unidentified (because unidentifiable) imbroglio of fudged hostility. The first stanza reads:

I

Cells of hatred, strong in even the greatest circle of love

so that you should not lose anything from the deep poison

in the way that has been eternally granted,

let unrecognised eternity be affronted.

I

[Haßzellen, stark im größten Liebeskreise

daß ihr des tiefen Giftes nichts verlört

in der unendlich zugegebnen Weise

sei unerkannt Unendliches empört.]

Expansive and restrictive descriptors play themselves out over polarities of unclear meaning. Key terms such as “eternal” / “unendlich” seem to refer to matters that are positive and negative, and poison is something that we do not wish to lose. Through the course of the poem, the fragments of the external world pile up one after another – doors, walls, alleyways, windows, clothes racks – as if they are following the associate logic of a dream. They possibly possess an autobiographical significance (and the loved one here may be mother rather than mistress), but their ordering is so concatenationary dense that they float free of any clear signification. This is the case in stanzas eight and nine, where the lyrical subject moves from the first to the generalising third person:

VIII

We are driven like wedges into the Underworld

into a thickened gaze – into the invisible.

And already our love bends down

to the rows of huts and houses.

IX

Join me with me, old wallpaper

at which I stared as a child seriously taken with fever.

When I finally turned away into the room

you were inside me, more than my veins were.

VIII

[Wir sind wie Keile Unterwelt hinein

in dichtes Sicht. Unsichtbares getrieben.

Und schon verbiegt sich unser Lieben

an Hüten und an Häuserreihen.

IX

Hab theil an mir, du einstige Tapete

an der ich starrte, fieberernstes Kind.

Wenn ich mich endlich weg ins Zimmer drehte,

warst du in mir, mehr, als die Adern sind.]

The contours of an inner world are being adumbrated, and the problemisation of “love” that the poem dramatizes may well be a response to the (attempted) erasure of the former. The primacy of interiority (and the need to protect it) are stated in generalising terms (in the form of a classic Rilkean sententia of his “philosophy” and in words that will inform his subsequent Duino Elegies) as the poem reaches its concluding climax:

XV

We have nothing but what is inside.

We have everything that is inside.

How do we grasp what is inside,

since that which flies away is also inside?

[Wir haben nichts, als was dort innen steht,

wir haben alles, was dort innen steht.

Wie fassen wir denn, was dort innen steht,

da auch das Fleigende dort innen steht?]

The art of Paul Klee (1879-1840) lacked the extravagant exuberance of form and colour that characterised that of Kokoschka but, as if to countermand this, Klee devoted his artistic career to shaping a classical formalism of shape and design that Rilke admired in all art, including poetry. Rilke met Klee in Munich in 1913, in the company of other members of the “Blue Rider” group, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Kee in the work of his late period cultivated an ethereality that was not achieved through the conventional images of cloud or air but by a sharp delineation of draughtsman-like slim lines. As Rilke wrote on 23 February 1921 to Wilhelm Hausenstein who had just published Kairun, oder die Geshichte vom Maler Klee, Klee’s work seemed to proceed in accordance with the rules of “determined regularities”(“Gesetzmäßigkeiten”). Rilke had found the same realisation of form (where form absorbs the subject matter; where it is impossible to speak of or even see subject matter beyond form) in Rodin and Cézanne, but Klee was without their monumentality and, in spite of their radical intervention into perspective, their linkage to representationalism. Klee, Rilke continues to explain in his letter, is like one who has found himself to be in the midst of disaster but who is still able “to put into writing, in the margins of a sheet of paper, where no one has previously been, to do just enough to draw the curve of a life”. “KLee is a creative observer [‘Aufzeichner’] of movement and activity that turns away from us eschewing any connection with anything and is of such little service that in an “ivre d’absence” dedicates himself purely to their forms”. “Here begins, I conjecture his actual “True-Saying” [‘Wahr-Sagen’], a premonition of which I received back then in 1915, when he allowed me to peruse around forty of his sheets for a few months in my room [in Munich]”.

This is an appraisal that Rilke expounded upon in a further letter written in the same month to Baladine Klossowska, who was herself an artist. Once again, he returns to Hausenstein’s book and to its illustrations of Klee’s work. Rilke comments, “his manner of seeing is markedly spiritual [Rilke is writing in French and the word he uses is “spirituelle”, “spiritual” but also intellectually subtle, “witty”] and at times amusing”. His artwork (paintings, drawings, sketches), in their “eschewal [‘Fortfall’] of subject matter”, occupy a space between music and graphics, bringing about a “short-circuit of the arts behind the back of nature and even of the imagination”. In face of the nihilism and destructiveness of the war, which the visual artist might seek to depict in “fragments and pieces”, Rilke found that Klee’s graphics produced in him an “immense tranquility” [‘immense Beruhigtheit’] and an ineffable feeling of “healing”.

Rilke tried to find an objective correlative for the intangible quality of the value and effect of Klee’s art. In doing so, he moved beyond the conventional mode of pictorial art (art that was demarcated through colour and shape and its physical structuration in canvas and frames) to a type of familiar art that was (viewed from a conventional angle) not “art” at all and which existed outside the purview of all but the most innovatory of modern artists: the puppet or doll. In March 1913, the poet attended an exhibition of the work of Lotte Pritzel in Munich and wrote an essay (part description; part prose fantasy) on her work that was published the following year (“Puppen: Zu den Wachs-Puppen von Lotte Pritzel”, vi: 1063-1074). Lotte Pritzler had created a new type of doll (a post-doll doll). Dolls in the past had been “incomplete objects” (“halben Gegenstand”) belonging to children, familiar household items like tools or crockery. They were “by nature lower” than us (“lag tiefer von Natur” (vi: 1070). Pritzler had brought puppetism to an extreme, its extreme realisation. She had captured in her puppets their ens realissima, creating mannequins who were not just recognisable people but were social figures, socialites, caught in time going through the rituals of polite society, dressed in costumes of taste and decorum which highlighted their aristocratic origins and often formed in romantic even erotic poses. Pritzler’s dolls had left childhood behind.

Rilke recognised not only the sui generic character of her work (the excellence of her craft) but realised that what she was doing involved a completely novel way of conceptualising art. The life-like forms of her puppets not only represented a new artistic subject but also called forth and demanded a different way of looking, one that collapsed the traditional subject-object distinction that adhered to Western art appreciation, which painters, such as Cezanne and Paul Klee, had sought to undo. The pivotal issue was, once again, perspective, but this time it was seen, so to speak, from an ontological point of view, where different realities in this realm of puppets were being played off against one other. The puppets move (in simulacrum), are caught in the act of doing things, and Rilke attempts to give this process a name, not one but several (the process refuses unilinear definition): the subject of this puppet drama is one that Rilke must seek. The first-person pronoun is used throughout his text as is the collective “one” / “man”, but the real subject is the much more amorphous subject that results with the fusing of these speaking subjects with the dolls.

Certainly, there are moments when the identity that arises from this is unambiguously clear. Puppets are endowed “with a firmness of a heart which possesses them all the more strongly as their body yields (this almost makes them in a higher sense mortal” (“haben ein Herz, das sie umso stärker durchdringt, je mehr ihr Körper nachgiebt (fast werden sie dadurch in einem höheren Sinne sterblich)” (vi: 1065). Such descriptors soon give way, however, to the associative identity of puppets, what they make us think of, what in fact their ultimate significance is, and here Rilke moves into an entirely different discursive mode. Their connotations transcend their denotations. Puppets make us “recall the delicate beauty acquired by certain things that are wholly and intimately integrated into human life” (“eine feinfühlige Schönheit gewisse Dinge sich anzueigen wußten, die ins menschliche Leben ausführlich und innig einbegriffen waren” (vi: 1065-1066). As the essay unfolds the puppet pulls one layer after another of itself, to reveal something more complex within. Its relationship to the world is complex. “The doll establishes a distance between ourselves and the amorphous world pouring into us” (“ein breites Wesen zu spalten in Teil und Gegenteil, uns gewissermaßen durch sie die Welt, die unabgegrenzt in uns überging” (vi: 1067). It possesses an “unholy influence” (p. 5). “Unholy” / “unheilig” because the puppet is made from something brighter (but ultimately darker) within us, a “discontent with which the doll has corrupted its spirit” (“aus Widerspruch gegen das Unbefriedigtsein, mit dem sie sein Gemüt verdorben hat” (vi: 1069). It looks and feels like a thing, but this is a trick of the eye, something apparent to those who fail to think with the puppet. This “being-less-than-a thing, in all its inevitability, contains the secret of the doll’s predominance” (“dieses Weniger-sein-als-ein-Ding, in seiner ganzen Unheilbarkeit enthält das Geheimnis ihres Ubergewichts” (i: 109) (p. 5).

The doll represents a certain depth within the human psyche. “We mix in the doll, as if in a test-tube, everything that we are experiencing but cannot recognise” (“wie in einem Probierglas mischten wir in ihr, was uns unkenntlich wiederfuhr” (vi: 1067). We may call it an “idle creature” (“beschäftigunglose Geschöpf”, or even a “monster” (“Ungeheur”) (vi: 1068), but the puppet readily absorbs attempts to dismiss it. It meets such deprecating terms with silence, “not because it feels superior but it remains silent because this is its established form of evasion” (“dann schwieg sie, nicht aus Uberlegenheit, schwieg, weil das ihre ständige Ausrede war” (vi: 1068). The doll belongs to otherness and cultivates that same dimension within us. “At a time when everyone was concerned to give us prompt and reassuring answers, the doll was the first to make us aware of that silence larger than life which later breathed on us again and again out of space, whenever we came at any point to the border of our existence” (“Zu einer Zeit, wo noch alle bemüht waren, uns immer rasch und beschwichtigend zu antworten, war sie, die Puppe, die erste, die uns jenes überlebensgroß Schweigen antat, das uns später immer wieder aus dem Raume anhauchte, wenn wir irgendwo an die Grenze unseres Dasein traten” (vi: 1068-1069).

This is “the soul” of the doll, and the terms in which it is explored in the text suggest that it is analogous to a certain inflexion of consciousness and of a mind that can only be reached with difficulty, “this proud, credible, almost visible soul. How you shook the walls, the window frames and familiar horizons into movement” (“stolze, glaubwürdige fast sichtbare Seele. Wie du die Mauern, die Fensterkreuze, die täglichlichen Horizonte zum Schwanken brachtest” (vi: 1071), and was “something quite different, invisible, something we held at arm’s length” in which (we may extrapolate) resides the inception of the artistic venture. Rilke has no need to invoke Nietzsche or Freud, the Dionysian or the id. He does not wish to depart from the familiar. For Rilke, what he is describing needs to be demonstrated by no more that the uncovering of a doll or a common toy, here, in his essay, an old rocking horse used by St George and put into the service of the slaying of the dragon and which we still remember, “that dragon that transformed the flood tide of our feelings into a lump inside, into a perfidious and indifferent permanence” (“unser flutendsten Gefühle in dir zur Masse werden ließ, zu einer perfiden, gleichgültigen Unzerbrechlichkeit” (vi: 1071). Such puppets move within an artistic realm where the literal and the symbolic are one.

Typographically made all the more effective by the fact that the entire essay consists of just two paragraphs.

DELETIONS

which brings no form of resolution. The poem exhibits a certain note of desperation, which comes from the attempt to understand the dead in life.

Rilke would like to preserve her in that mode, but she will not allow him to do so.

omething that is reflected in the “extreme restlessness of the poem and in its “to-and-fro” oscillation of tone, mood and diction (Charlie Lough, Rilke: The Life of the Work. Oxford UP, 2020, p. 216,

Elsewhere in the poem, Rilke draws our attention to the fact that Paula was a woman. Here death, as we hear in the concluding words of the second stanza, is a death (in childbirth) that has

Collapsing the subject-object divide involves not the “I” speaking of art but art speaking of the “I”.

We can best understand modern art by removing art from art.

For Rilke, the puppets possessed an alternative presence, existing within a different frame of signification to previous art works. Unlike the traditional subject matter of art (such as those drawn from nature) the puppet was already present amongst us, firmly located in the human realm, but the dolls represented a space of knowledge, a subject that is constantly deferred.

They were the vehicles of totemistic recall.

With her dolls, we were looking into a mirror, in a house of mirrors.

and it was Rilke’s language that was, in its appropriation of Cezanne, the subject of his statement, and for all its nuanced visualism and pointillist detail, the structure of his sentences followed the classical subject-object-preterit form.

Even in his most penetrating art criticism, the letters on Cezanne, Rilke had not opened up the identity of himself as a viewing subject. The “I” had been taken for granted, submerged under the angular but eloquent density of language.

What the dolls were and what they represented were one and the same. In his essay, Rilke gives words to that submerged subject, allowing the dolls to speak for themselves.

disconcertingly, the puppet is us and is not us (and hence the subject-object divide will not work).