Reading Colour by Rey Conquer;

Author:Rey Conquer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Lang Copyright AG
Published: 2019-06-19T05:12:24+00:00

* * *

1 Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 13.

2 Virginia Woolf, Walter Sickert: A Conversation (London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1934), p. 23.

3 ‘It seems that this [i.e. Delacroix’s] colour – if the reader will forgive such linguistic subterfuges to express what are extremely subtle ideas – thinks by itself, independently of the objects which it clothes.’ Charles Baudelaire, ‘Exposition Universelle 1855’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), ii, 575–97 (p. 595).

4 ‘Worpswede’, KA IV:305–400 (p. 307); Anthony Phelan discusses this with reference to the Neue Gedichte in his (excellent) critical guide, Anthony Phelan, Rilke: Neue Gedichte (London: Grant & Cutler, 1992), p. 26. With regard to the idea of ‘looking at the thing itself’ one must be wary: Rilke famously ‘surrounded’ his work of this decade with ‘a lot of propaganda’, and, as Judith Ryan points out, ‘the representation of objects as such is not the ultimate effect of the New Poems.’ The fact that colour, as Woolf has Orlando find out, is notoriously unco-operative in such attempts at representation helps, I hope, guard against an insistence on this. Ryan’s accounts of Rilke’s reading and poetic development with and against literary predecessors helpfully demystify the idea of the poet as sui generis, ‘The Intertextual Maze: Rilke’s “Der Turm” and His Relation to Aestheticism’, Comparative Literature Studies, 30.1 (1993), 69–82 (p. 69); Rilke, Modernism and the Poetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 50.

5 Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, in KA III:435–665 (p. 456).

6 Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (London: The Hogarth Press, 1940), p. 172.

7 8 August 1903. For ease of reference, I will use dates as opposed to page numbers for letters; the editions consulted can be found in the bibliography. The exception to this is the letters to Clara Westhoff published as Briefe über Cézanne which will be dated and additionally given a page reference from the Kommentierte Ausgabe.

8 Leighton, On Form, p. 125.

9 Phelan, p. 47.

10 The phrase ‘einfaches Schauen’ is used of both Cézanne and Rodin: 12 October 1907 KA IV:614 and KA IV:430. The word ‘unparteiisch’ is used several times in the letters, for instance 29 October 1907 KA IV:627.

11 A point made by Helen Bridge in ‘Rilke and the Modern Portrait’, The Modern Language Review, 99.3 (2004), 681–95 (p. 686).

12 Herman Meyer, ‘Rilkes Cézanne-Erlebnis’, in Zarte Empirie: Studien zur Literaturgeschichte (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1963), pp. 244–86 (p. 262).

13 In, for instance, the fifth ‘Elegy’ the tawdry artificial colours of Madame Lamort’s hats suggest inauthenticity, an attention to surface over depth: ‘Colour is not an accidental attribute of the substance that is the “figure”, it is the substance itself: it is the form that is accidental.’ Karine Winkelvoss, Rilke, la pensée des yeux (Asnières: Publications de l’Institut d’Allemand d’Asnières, 2004), p. 238.

14 We might compare this to the conclusion to the monograph on the Worpswede artists, where the relationship of inner and outer is inverted, ‘Das ist alle Kunst: Liebe, die sich über Rätsel ergossen hat, – und das sind alle Kunstwerke: Rätsel,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.