You Must Change Your Life

by Rachel Corbett

  RILKE’S PATRON WAS NOT the only person becoming frustrated by the poet’s capricious and costly travels. Back in Berlin, Westhoff complained to her new friend Andreas-Salomé about Rilke’s prolonged absences. Their so-called “interior marriage,” based on letters and distance, had left her to raise Ruth alone, and she often barely scraped by on her teaching income.

  Andreas-Salomé was horrified. She advised Westhoff to notify the police if Rilke did not begin fulfilling his paternal obligations soon. Westhoff must have known that the mere suggestion of legal action—particularly coming from his dear Lou—would humiliate Rilke, hopefully into compliance. She wrote to her husband to tell him what his friend had said.

  As she expected, the letter detonated on Rilke’s Italian vacation. He wrote an impassioned defense to his wife and, in a roundabout way, to Andreas-Salomé, whom he knew would hear about it. He accused his old friend of hypocrisy, reminding them how Andreas-Salomé had always urged him to elevate his art above all external demands. Being a father was an honorable pursuit, but a poet’s calling was an imperative, he said, ignoring the fact that Andreas-Salomé’s actual advice was to not start a family at all.

  Rilke pleaded with his wife for understanding and then he praised her. But he stuck to his resolve to pursue the prodigal path: “I will not give up my hazardous, so often irresponsible position and exchange it for a more explainable, more resigned post until the last, the ultimate, final voice has spoken to me,” he said.

  It’s not that Rilke didn’t value love, he just preferred it as an intransitive verb: without object, like a radiating circle. Otherwise to love was to possess another, while to be loved was to be possessed. Or, as he would more pointedly put it in Malte, “To be loved means to be consumed in flames. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to endure.” To Rilke, the home’s hearth was the brightest-blazing fire and he would rather jump out a window than risk burning alive; if he fell flat, at least a scarred face was better than one that resembled somebody else’s. To Rilke, family was the ultimate annihilation of self.

  He failed to see that his wife at least partly agreed—except that it was she who wanted to fulfill her calling. So while Rilke spent his Christmas in Capri, Westhoff made her way to Egypt, where some friends had offered her a few commissions and a place to stay while she worked. Rilke had not seen her so determined in years: “Since that first contact with Rodin she has not reached out for anything with so much need and real hunger as now.”

  As he entered a fallow period in his own career, he was perhaps a bit envious of her industriousness, too. His trip to Italy had proved to be an utter mistake. There were too many distractions there: drunken German tourists thundered through town, while his hostess’s friends did too much socializing and too little work. Although one could always locate remote corners in Italy to find peace, Paris was the only place where he had truly been able to work. The city had treated him a bit like military school, forcing him to overcome his fears by writing through them. Except this time Rodin drove him out before he had the chance to complete his education.

  “I have again stored up so very much longing for complete solitude, for solitude in Paris. How right I was when I considered that the next necessity, and how much harm I did myself when, contrary to all understanding, I half missed, half wasted this opportunity. Will it come again? On that, it seems to me, everything depends,” he wrote in February.

  He bided his time until spring, when Westhoff returned from Egypt. They spent two weeks together in Italy, but any lingering trace of passion between them was now permanently gone. Rilke had been eager to hear her tales from Africa but she came back with nothing to say. She walked around with a look of disappointment on her face that reminded him of Beuret, whose perpetually grimaced look made one acquaintance exclaim, “My god, was it really necessary for her to make herself look so unloved?” Then Westhoff and Rilke’s paths diverged once again; this time she left for Germany and he went to France, alone. Although the pair maintained a close bond for years to come, the image of their marriage was one they no longer tried to frame.

  Rilke knew Paris would be different this time around. He was nobody’s son now, nobody’s secretary. He was scarcely even a father or husband anymore. Let lovers consume each other like wine, he reasoned, he had finally disentangled himself from those vines. When Franz Kappus once complained that the loved ones in his life were going away, Rilke told him that he should instead see how “the space around you is beginning to grow vast.” This was the empty place where he found himself now, somewhere between the lines, where he could breathe free at last.

  CHAPTER

  11

  AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY TORE OFF FROM THE NINETEENTH, a new generation of artists ventured into unknown territory without looking back. In Western Europe, many embraced the colonial spirit of exploration in their work by appropriating “primitive” African art and toying with sexual taboos. In a few short years, the cottony brushstrokes of Impressionism had hardened into the spiky lines of Cubism, and Monet’s parasol-adorned ladies had stripped down to Toulouse-Lautrec’s feathers and garters.

  Simultaneous strides toward Cubism in France, Futurism in Italy and Expressionism in Germany all paved the way for a new abstract art, which promised to either liberate painting or destroy it, depending on whom you asked. If there was such a thing as a literary manifesto for the moment, it was the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer’s 1908 book Abstraction and Empathy: A Psychology of Style.

  The work was originally intended solely as a dissertation, and the twenty-six-year-old doctoral candidate never anticipated the widespread enthusiasm that greeted the text upon its publication. The idea for the book had come to him by chance. As he explained in a foreword to a later edition, he had been searching long and aimlessly for a research topic when it hit him one day in 1905, during a visit to the Trocadéro, Paris’s museum of ethnographic art.

  Many Parisians avoided the musty, run-down building, which was a relic from the 1878 World’s Fair. There was no one else there that spring day, apart from Worringer and two older gentlemen, he later recalled. Then he recognized one of them as none other than Georg Simmel, his former professor in Berlin. The sociologist was in Paris for the meeting with Rodin that Rilke had helped arrange for him.

  The professor apparently did not see his former student that day and they never spoke. Yet it was during those hours, coexisting in the museum “in a contact consisting solely in the atmosphere created by his presence,” that Worringer experienced “in a sudden, explosive act of birth the world of ideas which then found its way into my thesis and first brought my name before the public.”

  When Worringer returned home he set to work on a sprawling, speculative inquiry into why artistic movements occurred when they did throughout history. He never explained precisely what effect Simmel’s presence had on him that day. But it undoubtedly reminded him of the sociologist’s research into social upheavals and the creative movements they fostered. Worringer now merged these ideas with the theories of another former professor, Theodor Lipps, whose research on einfühlung informed Worringer’s belief now that two categories encompass all art: abstraction and empathy. The entire continuum of art history spanned these two poles, he argued. The point at which any one art movement appeared on the spectrum had to do with the psychological health of the society that produced it.

  Empathic art tended to be representational and to flourish during times of prosperity. Artists in these periods developed techniques to convey dimension, depth, and other painterly illusions in order to surround themselves with reflections of their blissful reality. Worringer argued that holding up mirrors to the outside world allowed artists like those of the Italian Renaissance or Greek antiquity to identify with its beauty.

  Meanwhile, abstraction arose out of turmoil. Artists who endured war or famine attempted to organize their chaotic lives through the use of orderly mathematical forms, like the geom
etric mosaics of the Byzantine Empire or the pyramidal architecture of ancient Egypt. Repetition was soothing, Worringer argued, while the angular shapes ran counter to the soft roundness of the human figure in an attempt by artists to distance themselves from their miserable realities.

  When he finished the manuscript, Worringer mailed copies to anyone he thought might give it a cursory glance. One recipient was the critic Paul Ernst, who did not realize that it was an unpublished student paper when he decided to review it in the popular German art magazine Kunst und Künstler and praised it for its prescient timeliness.

  Worringer’s binary may have been overly simplistic, but its bold scope garnered immediate curiosity. As soon as the issue hit newsstands, bookstores started receiving orders for the text that was not yet even bound. The Munich publisher Reinhard Piper also inquired about receiving a copy. When he discovered it didn’t yet exist, he had his company publish Abstraction and Empathy in 1908. It has since undergone twenty reprints, nine translations and inclusion in “more editions than any other theoretical work of German modernism,” according to the art historian Ursula Helg.

  Simmel himself was among the first to congratulate Worringer on the book. It turned out that the Kunst und Künstler reviewer was a friend of Simmel’s and had sent the professor a copy early on. When Simmel wrote the young author to tell him how impressed he’d been, the letter had “the effect of establishing a bridge, both mysterious and meaningful,” Worringer said, to his “happiest hour of conception.”

  A few years later, Andreas-Salomé sent a copy of the book to Rilke, who probably did not realize his tangential role in its genesis, in arranging for Simmel to be in Paris at the same time as Worringer. He wrote back that he had found himself “in absolute agreement.” (Andreas-Salomé was less impressed and told Rilke to keep her copy since he had liked it so much.)

  By proposing that art functions as an articulation of the self, Worringer’s book became a testament to the German Expressionist movement and to artists like Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke, and Franz Marc, who formed the spiritualist art collective Der Blaue Reiter. “Finally, for once, there was an academic who was receptive to and understanding of these new ideas, who would perhaps step up for them and defend them against so many conservatively inclined art historians, who rejected from the outset everything new and unusual, or didn’t even bother with it to begin with,” wrote Macke’s wife, Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke.

  The book debuted at such a serendipitous cultural moment that it accorded Worringer an almost prophetic status. During the two years he had spent writing about premodern abstract art movements, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso were in their studios inventing a new one by flattening time and motion onto singular planes. The year Abstraction and Empathy came out, Matisse complained that Braque’s contribution to the 1908 Salon d’Automne was nothing but a bunch of “little cubes.”

  The previous year, Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the apocalyptic masterpiece that came to define the end of one era and the beginning of another. Like Cézanne’s bathers, the flattened nude prostitutes in Picasso’s 1907 painting reject classical rules of perspective. Lacking depth, the three women on the left side seem to advance to the front of the canvas, as if soliciting the viewer. The two on the right wear African masks. Picasso went to cruder extremes than Cézanne, sharply slicing up the figures and piecing them back together to form new geometries.

  Like Worringer’s dissertation, the idea for Picasso’s Demoiselles came to him during a visit to the Trocadéro Museum. It was there that Picasso caught his first glimpse of Congolese masks, which had an artistic logic that both he and Worringer tried to explain. For Worringer, the mask was a catalyst toward abstraction because it concealed its wearer and withdrew him from a frightful society. To Picasso, the masks were “weapons,” used to protect tribal artists against evil spirits. They believed that by giving form to their fears they would purge themselves of them. It was then and there in the Trocadéro that Picasso “understood why I was a painter,” he said. “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism painting—yes absolutely!”

  Around that time, Picasso saw an El Greco painting hanging in his friend Ignacio Zuloaga’s studio that confirmed his ambitions for Les Demoiselles. He returned again and again to look at this picture of a saint with an elongated body, beckoning the stormy heavens. The painting, The Vision of St. John, was the same El Greco canvas that Rodin had tried to dissuade Zuloaga from buying during their trip to Spain two years earlier. With that painting, which today hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Picasso concluded that Cubism proceeded from El Greco and thus was “Spanish in origin.”

  THE TWENTIETH CENTURY REVIVAL of El Greco, an artist Rodin for so long despised, was a sign of the sculptor’s growing alienation from the new generation. He thought Cubism was a contrived movement and that “young people want to make progress in the arts too quickly.” They were “striving for originality, or what they believe to be originality, and they hasten to imitate it.”

  As European artists increasingly took inspiration from far-flung colonies, Rodin’s heroic monuments to French culture began to feel out of touch. In 1908, the year Picasso ventured most deeply into his African period, Rodin finished The Cathedral, a sculpture of two marble hands whose fingertips meet in an A-shape. They frame an internal space shaped like that of a cathedral vault. The new guard rolled their eyes at what they saw as typical Rodin schmaltz. The sculptor was becoming the symbol of art’s most tired traditions. “For the majority of young artists, looking to develop their own identity, the problem was Rodin,” wrote the art historian Albert Elsen.

  “When I began to do sculpture I didn’t understand [Rodin] at all,” said Aristide Maillol. “His works made absolutely no impression on me. I found them bad, that’s all.”

  Whereas Rodin’s work expressed movement and emotional intensity, younger artists now strove for static, mathematical indifference. Maillol, along with Amedeo Modigliani, thought Rodin’s art was overly representational and that his precise method of copying every last line and wrinkle made it feel slavishly constrained. They were interested in stripping away all that detail to reduce forms to their essential parts.

  When the twenty-eight-year-old Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi moved to Paris in 1904, he got a job as an apprentice to Rodin, only to quit a few weeks later. He realized that he had been unconsciously imitating the artist’s work and decided that “nothing grows under big trees.” In principle he agreed with Rodin that an artist should try to convey the essence of their subject, but his views diverged sharply when it came to its execution. “It is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface,” he said.

  Three years after Brancusi quit, he made his own sculpture called The Kiss. He summarized the pose of Rodin’s embracing lovers with the briefest of forms: a single limestone cube, divided down the center by a line. Brancusi etched long hair and a breast into one side, but otherwise showed no trace of Rodin’s arch-naturalism or emotionality in his primitive form, carved by Brancusi’s own hand.

  Henri Matisse, too, declared his independence from Rodin after receiving an unproductive critique from the sculptor in 1900. Matisse, then thirty, had brought some of his drawings to Rodin, who received the artist kindly in his studio, but showed little interest in the work. “He told me I had facility of hand, which wasn’t true,” Matisse recalled. Rodin then advised the young artist to “fuss over it, fuss over it. When you have fussed over it two weeks more, come back and show it to me again.”

  Matisse never returned. He wasn’t interested in fussy drawings and he was put off by Rodin’s dismissive attitude. That day Rodin “merely showed his petty side,” he recalled years later. “He could not do otherwise. For the best of what the old masters possess, that which is their raison d’être, is beyond their grasp. Having no understanding of it, they cannot t
each it.” He claimed that Rodin’s feedback mattered little to him anyway by then. His practice was rapidly becoming “the reverse” of Rodin’s. He saw that while Rodin could chop a hand off his St. John the Baptist and work on it in a separate room before reattaching it, Matisse could only see a work in terms of its overall architecture. It was a practice based on “replacing explanatory details by a living and suggestive synthesis.”

  The same year as their disagreeable studio visit, Matisse remade a version of Rodin’s Walking Man. He hired the same Italian model and sculpted the man in a nearly identical stance, armless and paused mid-stride. But Matisse’s figure, titled The Serf, is lumpier, cruder and less anatomically defined. Matisse had manipulated Rodin’s expressive vocabulary to create a more unified, painterly form.

  Each passing insult seemed to entrench Rodin more firmly in the past, and he embraced the position with ever more defiance. He turned his back on the future altogether, becoming “a man of the Middle Ages,” as Cézanne once described him. He began to amass a serious collection of antiquities from Greece, Egypt, the Orient and Rome, and he filled his library with antiquarian books. He bought up funerary sculpture, votives, reliefs, vases, Tanagra figurines, busts and torsos with such indiscriminate gusto—everything was, Que c’est beau!—that some of his dealers began inflating their prices and selling him forgeries. After his death, the Connoisseur magazine suspected that Rodin probably owned more fake antiques than authentic ones. But this never seemed to detract from the pleasure his collection gave him. “At home, I have fragments of gods for my daily enjoyment,” he once said. These works “talk to me louder, and move me more than living beings.”

  ANTIQUE DEALERS WERE NOT the only opportunists to notice Rodin’s careless accounting. Whether she meant to exploit him or help him, the Duchesse de Choiseul was a brilliant businesswoman. She nimbly marketed Rodin to American art collectors, who had previously been unmoved by his “obscene” nudes. When the artists Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz brought Rodin’s erotic drawings to a New York gallery in 1908, American critics denounced the exhibition. “Stripped of all ‘art’ atmosphere they stand as drawings of nude women in attitudes that may interest the artist who drew them but which are not for public exhibition,” declared the New York Press.