In the autumn of 1907, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke made numerous visits to the memorial exhibition in Paris of the work of Paul Cézanne, who had died the previous year; and wrote a sequence of letters about it to his wife Clara. He wrote of how Cézanne was the first artist who had“ demonstrated so clearly
the extent to which painting is something that takes place among the colours, and how one has to leave then completely alone, so that they can come to terms among themselves. Their mutual intercourse,” he concluded“, This is the whole of painting.”
I have often thought of this passage when looking at John McLean’s paintings.
Cézanne’s insight was taken up by Henri Matisse, who clarified it by painting with brighter, more vivid hues –“ construction by means of colour”, he called it – and it thereby passed into the mainstream of modern painting. Many artists have meddled with it, though, ignoring Rilke’s warning that“ whoever injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding [the colours’] activity”. However, if the artist acknowledges the specific qualities of the colours, and how these qualities are modified by the shape and size of the elements that carry them, the result will be, Rilke said – in words that fully apply to John McLean’s paintings – a“ simple truthfulness [that] educates you; and if you stand among them as ready as possible, you get the impression that they are doing something for you”.
John Elderfield is Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Allen R. Adler, class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum.
