(25 August 2025
(2 571 words)
(Reading Time: 14 minutes)
“With all eyes, animal life looks out / into the Open. It is our eyes only / that are turned within” (“mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur / das Offene. Nur unsere Augen sind / wie umgekehrt”: Duino Elegy 8). Rilke wrote extensively about art and artists. His earliest pieces were, on the whole, light-weight efforts, mainly reviews such as “Die neue Kunst in Berlin” and “Impressionisten” (both 1898), which were largely attempts to establish his credentials in the art world (and possibly in any world). In terms of the development of his pictorial imagination, more substantial were subsequent writings: the extended visual recollection in poetry of his childhood Prague in Offerings to Lares, (see Chapter One, below); the depiction of the Russian icon-maker in his volume of verse, The Hour Book (Chapter Two), Rilke’s book on the painters of the Worpswede colony, published in 1903 (Chapter Three), and his three diaries: the Florence Diary of 1898 (Chapter Two), the Schmargendorf Diary of 1900 and the Worspwede Diary of the same year (Chapter Four), his enthusiastic letters on Cézanne, sent to Clara, his wife, in 1907 (Chapter Six), his two essays (given as lectures) on Auguste Rodin in 1903 and 1907 (also Chapter Six), a, his discovery of El Greco, and the art of Egypt, Islam (Chapter Seven) and his late engagement with the Avant Garde: Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Marc and Paul Klee between1916-1920, Chapter Eight). To which we must add the many references to and discussions of art in his letters penned over a period of more than thirty years.
Rilke, who had between 1885 and 1889 studied art history in Prague, Munich and Berlin, not only knew art; he also knew artists, such as the Czech painter and engraver Emil Orlik (1870-1932), the Ukrainian Ilya Repin (1844-1930), the Russians Isaac Levitan (1860-1900) and Leonard Pasternak (1862-1945), the group of artists based in the north German village of Worpswede, most notably the painters Heinrich Vogeler (1872-1942) and Paula Becker (1876-1907), and the sculptor Clara Westhoff (his future wife, 1878-1954), the Spanish painter, Ignacio Zuloaga (1870-1945), whom Rilke met in Paris, and perhaps most famous of all, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Rilke learnt not only inspiration from these artists but something even more important: technique.
An early formulation of Rilke’s views on art, and the art of poetry, was the lecture, “Modern Poetry”, given in Prague in March 1898 (his only full-length pronouncement on this subject). The tone was characteristic of the early Rilke, combining the missionary pathos of the fin de siècle view of the artist with a celebration of the neglected Impressionism of poets such as Detlev von Liliencron. At the same time, his essay gave voice to a premonition of the increasing trend of neo-classicism (Stefan George and Hugo von Hofmannsthal), the controversial personal poetry of Richard Dehmel), and the demotic idiom of prose poetry (Peter Altenberg and Hermann Bahr). In its opening lines, Rilke took pains to distance himself from two dominant artistic movements of the age: Naturalism, “the mere representation and echo of the external world”, and “tendentious” art, that which promotes a political Weltanschauung and which is simply “versified journalism”. He also casted scorn on the German public and the “indifference” that it has shown to art, ridiculing its innate conservatism that prevented it from recognising the new (p. 2). His talk, both in its tone and rhetorical strategy, was effectively a manifesto arguing for the cultural primacy of the modern artist, in whom “the secrets of things merge inwardly with his own deepest feelings and become, as though these were his own desires, audible to him” (p. 3) as he pursues “the secret, deep, causal connection between image and sound” (p. 4). It was an image of the poet / artist as the hero of a pained but creative interiority, whose writing was the result of “an attempt by the individual to find himself under the flood of fleeting events and, in the noise of the everyday world, to hear into the deepest loneliness of his real being” (p. 1).
Rilke found one of the most creative impulses for the renewal of German art in “die Wiener Kunst”, a group of artists, “young Viennese”, whom he saw as embodying “the finest, soft movements of an elevated aestheticism” (p. 9). The “young Viennese” were part of the anti-establishment movement of the Vienna Secession, founded in 1897 by Gustav Klimt, a new impetus in modern art, which later would lead to the formation of the “Vienna Workshops” (“Wiener Werkstätte”) in 1903, in which the ethos of post-romanticism would give way to a more pragmatic, this-worldly but no less transfiguring grasp of the immediate world. It was a move that Rilke was soon, under the influence of Auguste Rodin (and the presence of Lou Andreas-Salomé), to make in his own writing.
As Antje Büssgen rightly observes, Rilke was not by nature a theoretician (Rilke Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung. Edited Manfred Engel. Metzler. 2004, p. 130). The essay “Modern Poetry” was followed not by further essays on art but by occasional jottings, aperçus, pregnant formulations, and meditative correspondence. There is, nonetheless, a recurrent set of themes, attitudes, positions that frame that intellectual / aesthetic life, fragmented and occasional as they might be. Rilke’s observations had little to do with “artistic appreciation”: as he once wrote, the ‘enjoyment’ of art is “a sluggishness at the expense of the abundancies that are operative in a work art” (Rilke, “On Art” in Letters on Life. Edited and translated by Ulrich Baer. New York. 2006, p. 147). Rilke did not attempt to describe what constituted a good or bad painting, nor to elevate certain artists above others. Nor did he believe in art as cultural capital. As he wrote in 1922, “the public have long forgotten that the work of art is not an object offered to them but one that has been placed purely into an imaginary realm where it exists and persists, and that this realm of its being only seems to be identical with the public sphere of transactions and trade” (“On Art”, p. 151). Nor did he see the point of theorising about art: art theory exists in “semi-polemical spirit that stands in exact opposition to the naive productive spirit with which each object wants to be grasped and understood” (“On Art”, p. 139).
What Rilke was trying to define in his writings on art was a particular form of engagement with the perceiving self and with the perceived world. His observations typically stress the self-possessed (perhaps obsessive) nature of the artistic vocation. As he wrote in a letter from June 1907 to his wife, Clara, “the creation of art always results from a state of having-been-in-danger, from an experience of having-gone-to-the-end, up to the point where no person can go any further”(“On Art”, p. 135), and he later added, “the life of a man who has reached a certain level in his engagement with art is disfigured in ways that from a certain angle appear close to mania (“On Art”, pp. 136-137). Art was a profoundly interior confession that is released under the pretext of a memory, an experience or an event” (“On Art”, p. 140).
These were familiar tropes within the discourse of Romantic aesthetics, but in other pronouncements Rilke went well beyond this aesthetic, as in the pragmatic “art means to be oblivious to the fact that the world already exists, and to create one. Not to destroy what one encounters but simply not to find anything complete. Countless possibilities. Countless wishes. And suddenly fulfilment: to be summer, to have sun. Without speaking about it, unwittingly. Never to be done” (“On Art”, p. 136).
Rilke, particularly in his later writing, more than once distanced himself from purely subjectivist models. “The artist may not choose what he wants to behold” (“On Art”, p. 149). The external world needs to be grasped, and the individual artist must come to terms with (perhaps ultimately sublimate) its facticity, where “the practice of artistic seeing first has to overcome itself to the point where even in the midst of what is terrible and apparently repulsive, it beholds only being that is valid along with everything else that is” (“On Art”, p. 148). “Seeing” is the operative term here. Art is “the preliminary stage for new insights or a kind of transfer to a higher plane of life where there would commence a more mature, greater seeing, a looking with rested, fresh eyes” (“On Art”, p. 147). And the same principle is later stated in an even more radical form, where art needs to be recognised “as nothing but the means to recapture something entirely invisible” (“On Art”, p. 138).
In art appreciation, it is conventional to place a space between the perceiving self and the perceived artwork: the subject looks at the object. Rilke wishes us to imagine what it might be to remove that space. Appreciation becomes, then, not the consuming of the artwork (Rilke had many scathing words to say about art galleries and museums). In this way of looking, “appreciation” does not convert into aesthetic enjoyment and then fixing that enjoyment through stylised language, but a realigning of the conditions of looking and a redefinition of the self that is looking. It is (to use a harsh word to the ear, but one that is more appropriate to the aesthetic goals of Rilke) an epistemological activity. “Seeing” both allows access to the world and possibly (from a certain philosophical angle) constitutes it, as in Berkeley’s “esse est percipi”.
The words of Heinrich Wiegand Petztet (in his introduction to Rilke’s letters on Cézanne) seem apposite here. Rilke’s promotion of “seeing” does not “refer exclusively to works of art. The changes he feels, the newness and differences in his manner of seeing, does not only apply to his perception of paintings (let alone an external optical event). The particular transformation of the sense of sight is at the same time a transformation of the person standing in front of the pictures and writing about them. Or is it a change in the man that brings about this new way of seeing? The altered horizon of insight involves, in this seemingly minor context, a reclamation of language, an extension of its former boundaries that is never lost again”. And Petzet adds (because we are talking about a poet), “it begins with almost casual but actually unusual word formations” (Petzet, Letters on Cézanne. Edited by Clara Rilke. Vintage Books. 1991, p. xviii).
“Seeing” involves, then, a cognitive (but soon to become conceptual) revaluation of the world, as a form of understanding that goes well beyond the appropriation of objects. That understanding informs Rilke’s greatest writing, the New Poems, Malte Notebooks and the Duino Elegies, where “seeing” in both works upends conventional notions of understanding of the world (particularly time, space and causal logic) that are based on non-seeing.Here, “seeing” disrupts the world of appearances and values so that they can be seen for what they are (or not are). To understand how the aesthetic merges into and supports the epistemological (the gaining of knowledge) in Rilke, we must analyze this way of seeing, of looking, and to assess the significance of the external world in his writing, for example the centrality of the “Ding” motif in his poetry but also register the primacy of ocular knowledge over other forms of knowledge.
What is gained here is an understanding of the materiality of the sign, its tactile immediacy, the “vastness, movement and its depth” (Rilke, Auguste Rodin. Dover Publications. 2006, p. 1). This is a hallmark of Rilke’s writing, and particularly evident in the Malte Notebooks and the Duino Elegies (although less so in the Sonnets to Orpheus, which seem to move more within a classically aestheticized ambit). Rilke, the non-theoretician, rarely directly comments on this practice. For that we have to go what he has to say on other artists, to his essays and his letters on, for example, Rodin and Cézanne. As with Rodin’s sculptures, he too strove for an integration of parts, in which the “disturbances” addressed “would come to rest within the thing itself” (Auguste Rodin, p. 12). Seen from this perspective, the artwork does not attempt to reproduce external reality but seeks to allow to arise within it “new unities, new associations, relationships and adjustments” (Auguste Rodin, p. 16), and Rilke adds elsewhere “by giving them many surfaces, innumerable, perfect and definite planes, he creates an effect of magnitude” (Auguste Rodin, p. 23). Such achieved complexity resists unilinear absorption. “As soften with Rodin, one does dare to interpret the meaning of his art. It has thousands. Thoughts pass like shadows over it, and behind each of them it rises new and enigmatic in its lucid and anonymous beauty” (Auguste Rodin, p. 18). These are big and elevated words (perhaps rhetorical), but they do in practice provide parameters for his greatest work, the Dunio Elegies.
Finally, we must recognise that there is a chronological (if not necessarily developmental) shape to Rilke’s valorisation of art, and that there is consequent shape to its variable influence on his poetology. It has been argued, for example, that “in his late work, Rilke no longer regarded the method of the ‘Dinggedicht’ as valid and fruitful for his continuing creative activity”, and with the abandonment of this method came a conscious renunciation of plastic visibility in his work” (Antje Büssgen in Rilke Handbuch, pp. 131-132). It is true that the emphasis upon the purely visual retreats after the ‘Dinggedichte’ of New Poems, as is testified by the aesthetically pivotal poem “Turning” (“Wendung”) from 1914, with its central directional lines “work of seeing is done, / now do heart work”, which apodictically seem to resolve matters in favor of the renunciation thesis.
But 1914 became1922, and heart work must be done, as in the Dunio Elegies, in a world that reveals itself almost exclusively in terms of perceived objects, sometimes human ones, faces, hands, arms, for example, all key tropes in that work, and other objects, windows, mirrors (where we are back again to seeing). Rilke does not give up viewing objects in his later work; he simply reconfigures them and disengages them from (the only implicit theory) that informed his formation of the ‘Dinggedicht’. Theory of the visual may have changed but it was not repudiated. In terms of his poetic discourse, the writing of poetry as art, it survives, as in Elegy 9, where we are told “perhaps we are indeed here: to say house, bridge, fountain, gate pitcher, fruit tree, window” (sind wir vielleicht hier. um zu sagen: Haus, Brücke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug, Ostbaum, Fenster”). These objects are so powerfully observed that they no longer require an observer. They assert themselves in Rilke’s text to the point where they approximate an ontological reism, perhaps enacting a homily to Cezanne’s paintings, such as the “Blue Vase” (1889), or the “Women with the Coffee Pot” (1892). In the final analysis, as Martin Heidegger wrote about Van Gogh’s picture of peasant shoes, in their self-sufficiency they “open up a world, and keep it abidingly in force”, and in doing so allow it to reach a point where it can finally be understood (“seen” is also a word we can use) that “the world worlds” (Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art. Translated David Krell, New York. 2008, p. 44).
Rilke, Duino Elegies Comparing Translations Martin Travers 