Anticipating National Gallery Cezannes

. . .he speaks of the possibility of writing a monograph on the color blue, beginning with the pastels of Rosalba Carriera and the special blue of the eighteenth century, whereupon he mentions Cezanne's "very unique blue." In the course of the letters he produces a series of variations of this blue, forumlations whose expressive power exceeds everything that has ever been said about this color. An October morining in Paris presents him with a "completely supportless blue"(October 11); two days later, in front of the pictures in the Salon , he speaks of "the good conscience of these reds, these blues." Thereupon , while crossing the Place de la Concorde, the poet becomes aware of "an ocean of cold. . . barely-blue," while the houses in the background loom in a "blue dove-gray." The obelisk, around whose granite there is always "a glimmering of blond old warmth," holds "an ancient Egyptian shadow-blue" in its hieroglyphic hollows. . . Intensity of perception increases, and with it the wealth of nuances in the experiencing of blue: a "self-contained blue" (in van Gogh) is joined by a "listening blue" and a "thunderstorm blue" in Cezanne, with sky-blue and sea-blue as the only conventional mentions of the color. Until, in the end, in the second letter from Prague, a "bourgeois cotton blue" and a "light cloudy bluishness" evoke the whole scale of a single color as it was painted by the artist and named by the poet: from a "densely quilted blue" through "waxy blue," "wet dark blue," "juicy blue," to that slope of curved hills in a van Gogh: "full of revolt, Blue, Blue, Blue."

From Heinrich Wiegand Petzet's Foreward to Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters on Cezanne (Edited by Clara Rilke. Translated by Joel Agee. New York: North Point Press, 2002.)