Letters on c�zanne - rainer maria rilke

Rilkes prayerful responses to the french masters beseeching art For a long time nothing, and then suddenly one has the right eyes.

Virtually every day in the fall of 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke returned to a Paris gallery to view a Cezanne 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 Cezannes impact on him could not be conveyed in a traditional essay.

Rilkes sense of kinship with Cezanne provides a powerful and prescient undercurrent in these letters -- passages from them appear verbatim in Rilkes great modernist novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge .

Letters on Cezanne is a collection of meaningfully private responses to a radically new art.