Reading Rilke's Diaries resonates for me, as a temporary resident in Berlin: "most people … blindly race past a thousand unobtrusive beauties on their way to those official sights that usually only disappoint them anyway."
But here even more:" Know then that art is the means by which singular, solitary individuals fulfil themselves. What Napoleon was outwardly, every artist is inwardly. One climbs higher with each victory, as if with each new tread of a stair. But did Napoleon ever win a battle to please the public?"
How about that, and:
"One is inevitably unjust to a work of art the moment one attempts to evaluate it in association with others. In the end that leads to questions like: Raphael or Michelangelo, Goethe or Schiller, Suderman or -, and the good Germans have always loved such parlour games."
Or then the very intriguing:
"Occasionally viewed gallery pictures confuse. Our eyes take in along with them – even when they hang isolated in one room – the impression of this strange space, an arbitrary gesture of the gallery attendant, perhaps even the recollection of a scent, which will all now unfairly insinuate themselves in our memory. This conglomerate, which under certain circumstances might be able to enhance the mood, is in its randomness and cruel lack of style perverse. It is like the visit one pays a great and important man in a hotel. I remember several such visits; with one there is irremediably etched in my mind, alongside the appearance of the personality in question, a bedside chest whose door opened constantly with a little crowing sound, and also some errant slipper; and another I can only think of in the company of a badly ravaged breakfast tray over which a shirt collar had been stretched lengthwise like a bridge."
Yes, it is true, the time of day, our emotional states, all influence how we see art, and so as Rilke says, pictures only occasionally viewed in a gallery may not be seen justly, or clearly as themselves. But what can be done? Only a few favoured people like the Queen can own a Vermeer and observe it every day, (if she does). One person, one work of art truly seen, or thousands glimpsing hundreds of works of art for a few seconds, that is the difference a hundred and ten years brings, but well worth being aware of in the hasty judgements.
