Daniel O'Sullivan
Notes on the paintings
I. The Elegy Figure. Oil. 50X40”
Traditionally, an elegy is a lament for the passing away of what was loved. For Rilke it is a lament for the human condition; and no unseen powers will listen to our cries. And even if one of these angels drew near, its beauty would only destroy us. He introduces many of the themes of the following elegies: the hero, the woman, the bridge, the tower, the lovers and the notion of love as intransitive, the presences from “the other relation,” like the dead Polyxène, wearing the sailor suit. I allude to this as well with the transparent figures that can also be read as reflections from the unseen space this side of the picture plane. The poet and the more traditional angel as messenger or servant for the management, are back on the left. The serial openings to darkness on the wall behind them bear a closer resemblance to the angelic orders that Rilke invokes. The Classical figure in the foreground shares the same lighting and horizon as the rest of the painting but the model is still free of this depicted vision. I think she reflects a truth about all of us: we’re caught up in our own experience of the world but at the same time we’re outside of our experience, attending.
II. The Attic Stele. Oil. 50X40”
Rilke marveled at how lightly the figures touch one another on Greek funerary monuments and mourns over the fact that we let the other, the beloved, get in the way of realizing what love is. We must pass through the other to “the open,” a redemptive timeless realm. Instead we hold on to the other and our love eludes us. There is an echo here of St. Augustine: what is lovable is a reflection of the beauty and goodness of the Creator. There’s a popular epigram of Rilke’s that God should be a direction of the heart not a destination. Rilke reacted strongly against the mawkish Catholicism of his mother and the religious austerity he had cultivated in the hostile surroundings of an Austrian military school. The earlier part of the poem is a breathtaking description of the angelic orders. Here the angel, dressed as a page in blue uniform, draws the viewer back to the horizon.
III. Nocturne. Oil. 50X40”
The third Elegy with its nightmarish imagery is about the disturbing power of sexual instinct, “the hidden guilty river god of the blood.” It is as though ancestral presences, alive within him and ready to take over, threaten his fragile identity. There is no longer a mother’s candle to reassure the child in the night, who fears abandonment to these presences. This is a recurring theme in the Elegies, that the self, as a substantial reality, may not really exist but be only a provisional construct. Rilke wanted the following (translated) lines to be inscribed on his headstone: Rose, O pure contradiction, desire to be nobody’s sleep under so many lids. (There is a play in German on the words for eyelids, lidern and songs, the archaic liedern.
IV. The Performance. Oil. 50X40”
The elegy treats of the observer and the observed, and how disappointing the observed performance is; how dismal our grasp is of what we experience. Perhaps He’s referring to the interior watcher and his acting in the theatre of consciousness. This elegy was composed in Munich in 1915 while the War was raging. The white figure is holding a Pierrot mask. The puppet -like performers are standing in a niche that was once one of the Stations of the Cross.
V. The Acrobats. Oil. 50X40”
Possibly inspired by Picasso’s wonderful “Les Saltimbanques” from his Rose Period, the poem laments the plight of these poor street artists on a suburban Parisian square. Inevitably pressed by the drum to perform, they no longer remember the joy of the moment of achievement between struggling effort to master and sheer numbing routine. There is a very poignant description of the young girl who must, in her embarrassment, assist them and attract the passer by. The poet as traveler will reappear in the tenth painting.