Blue is the Colour ... Notes on Rilke's Blue Delirium

Blue is the colour found between violet and green on the visible spectrum of light as perceived by human eyes. It comes in many different hues, tints, and shades and varies dramatically in intensity and brightness, but is found at its purest at the middle of its range on the spectrum with a wavelength of 470 nanometres. 

Along with red and yellow, it is regarded as one of the three primary colours and much loved by painters. If it's extremely difficult for us to imagine the natural world in the absence of blue, it's virtually impossible to construct a history of modern art that doesn't refer repeatedly to this profoundly beautiful colour in its various guises; ultramarine, cobalt, cerulean, turquoise ... even the names make happy and contain a kind of poetry or word-magic.  

Recognizing this, Rilke famously speaks in his letters about the possibility of writing a monograph on the colour blue, beginning with the pastels of Rosalba Carriera and ending with the very unique blues of Cézanne. As the intensity of his blue-delirium increases before the canvases of the latter, Rilke speaks ecstatically of all kinds of blue, including: a waxy blue, a wet dark blue, a self-contained blue, a densely quilted blue, a thunderstorm blue, a bourgeois cotton blue, a juicy blue and an almost invisible blue that he terms barely-blue.

As one commentator notes, this blue-incantation goes beyond a mere listing of technical terms and although he makes conventional references to sea-blue and sky-blue, Rilke carefully avoids clichéd descriptions. For he's attempting to see colours differently and to stammer the first terms of a new language in which blueness is expressed directly and concretely; as it is by the truly great artists - be they poets or painters - who understand how the reality of colour arises from the work itself.


See: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, trans. Joel Agee, (North Point Press, 2002).

Portrait of the Führer as a Young Artist (Or How Hitler Helps Us Counter Aesthetic Idealism)

 Adolf Hitler, Self-Portrait (detail), 1910

Hitler had a long and passionate relationship with painting; one that swung from the love and devotion of his early years as a would-be art student in Vienna where he produced hundreds of sketches and water colours, to his notorious rejection as Führer of almost all modern work as degenerate.

In Mein Kampf (1925), he confesses how his youthful ambition was not to become a great statesman, but, rather, a great artist. Indeed, even in the dark days of 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, Hitler told a somewhat bemused UK Ambassador: 'I'm an artist, not a politician. Once the Polish question is settled, I want to end my days as a painter.'      

Unfortunately, however, most of Hitler's pictures - whilst technically competent and not lacking in a certain charm - displayed only a mediocre and all-too-conventional talent; one that failed to convince the examiners of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, who twice rejected his application to enrol as a student (first in 1907 and again a year later).     
  
But some - particularly the faceless self-portrait above in which a 21-year-old Adolf sits on a stone bridge and dangles his feet over a colourful stream (possibly contemplating his own failure and growing sense of alienation and anonymity) - really have something intriguing and challenging about them.     

At any rate - and as Peter Beech, a freelance journalist and subeditor on the Culture and Review section of The Guardian (a paper not known for its Nazi sympathies) concedes - Hitler's work, whether we like it or not, isn't that bad. It's certainly superior to most of the outsider art produced by the criminal and/or criminally insane. Beech writes:

"I'm no expert, but I sense that the putdowns of the art world are overstated. Hitler's paintings are amateurish, but they certainly aren't an abomination - that came later. In fact, they're quite sweet. The man who dreamed up the death of the Jews proves to be a surprisingly dab hand at sunlight on stone walls. They show him nearly getting it right, or at least not getting it very wrong. This is much, much worse. Looking at these pictures, it's not enough to say they are something Hitler tossed off during his brief, early masquerade as a human being. The artist quite clearly has a grasp of a very nuanced and very human proposition: what is beautiful."
   
This, as Beech points out, is problematic - not least of all for those beautiful souls who think art has something important to teach us; that it's morally instructive and uplifting:

"What is the link now - if any - between aesthetics and morality? We all accept that our creatives needn't lead impeccable lives, but it's something else to admit that true monsters are capable of taste. ... Hitler's paintings, if we look at them, hard, should help us dismiss any lingering belief that we can learn in a moral sense from something that demonstrates technical accomplishment. They confirm, if we needed confirmation, that there has never been any relation between form and content, between what is pretty and what is right. ... If Hitler can do loveliness, then it has nothing to teach us. Beauty is simply beauty - and that's the truth."

Many have come to accept the banality of evil. But it's only a few as yet who admit also the superficiality of art. 


See: Peter Beech, 'Face it, Hitler's art isn't that bad', The Guardian, 29 April, 2009.