Letters on Cézanne

“[This collection] says more about art than any other book I know…These letters distill for the reader the essence of what a painting truly is…The greatness of Cézanne could be conveyed only by an artist equally great.”–HOWARD MOSS, The New Yorker
Virtually every day in the fall of 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke returned to a Paris gallery to view a Cézanne 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.
Rilke was knowledgeable about art and had even published monographs, including a famous study of Rodin that inspired his New Poems. But Cézanne’s impact on him could not be conveyed in a traditional essay. Rilke’s sense of kinship with Cézanne provides a powerful and prescient undercurrent in these letters — passages from them appear verbatim in Rilke’s great modernist novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Letters on Cézanne is a collection of meaningfully private responses to a radically new art.
“Rilke makes the feeling and views around great art real, weaving into his letters the indescribable thing that gives us beauty, truth, pleasure.”–HELEN FRANKENTHALER, Art & Antiques
“[These letters] are themselves extraordinarily peaceful and concentrated, seeping with the sense and recognition of Cézanne’s colors, in nature as on canvas, colors which seem a part of Rilke himself, of the words and paper.”–JOHN BAYLEY, The New York Review of Books