Duino Elegies at Gagosian 980 Madison Avenue, New York

February 19, 2020

DUINO ELEGIES Opening reception: Thursday, March 5, 6–8pm March 5–April 11, 2020 980 Madison Avenue, New York __________ For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear, and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us. —Rainer Maria Rilke Gagosian is pleased to present Duino Elegies, a group exhibition that traces the resonance of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry through artworks spanning the past 150 years. In 1912, Rilke was invited to stay at Duino Castle—a fortress just north of Trieste, Italy—by the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis. There, while standing atop a cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea, he claimed to hear the following line: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” Rilke eventually used these words to open the Duino Elegies, a 1923 collection of ten intensely religious metaphysical poems. Concerned with the interplay of suffering and beauty in human existence, the Elegies also project a hopeful vision of a more peaceful world. Two decades earlier, Rilke had moved to Paris to write a monograph on Auguste Rodin, initiating a complex but lasting friendship between the two men. Rilke venerated the sculptor’s ability to translate poetic sentiments into figuration, as exemplified by Rodin’s large bronze La Muse tragique (1896). Originally conceived seven years prior for the Monument to Victor Hugo—in which the muse, perched above the French literary giant, whispers inspiration to him—La Muse tragique is presented here as a single figure, evoking a heightened pathos befitting its subject’s symbolic identity.

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