Marcel Proust’s masterwork In Search of Lost Time, published in seven volumes from 1913 through 1927, is as much a rumination on the slip and slide of time as it is a time capsule. In it is bottled high society in early 20th-century France—its salons, seaside getaways, tea cakes, and of course, visual art. Proust, in fact, name-dropped some 100 artists throughout his famed tome, from Botticelli and Leonardo to Whistler and Vermeer, giving color to characters’ lives both inner and outer.
“It is only through art,” he wrote in the book’s sixth volume, The Fugitive, “that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon.”
Paul César Helleu, (c. 1892). Photo courtesy Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.
And what might the French author’s own landscapes look like? A forthcoming show at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, Spain, is giving Proust the Proust treatment by using art to bring his aesthetic ideas and thematic obsessions to life.
Proust’s Paris was undergoing a tremendous transformation at the turn of the century, one that reshaped its industry and urban infrastructure and gave a boost to its art and culture scenes. That ambient modernity was reflected in the author’s prose, but so was Impressionism, which guided how Proust described his scenes and sensations. He ranked Monet and Vermeer among his favorite painters, while socializing with the artists of the day, including Picasso and Jean Cocteau.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, (1859–63). Photo courtesy Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.
“Proust and the Arts” vivifies this milieu with artworks that capture Proust’s aesthetic meanderings across Europe. There’s Whistler’s rendering of London’s Battersea Bridge and Paul César Helleu’s color-spotted oil of the interior of the Reims Cathedral in Paris. Proust’s fascination with Venice, sparked by his first reading of John Ruskin around 1899, is also given play here, particularly his love for Italian gothic architecture.
Claude Monet, (1916–19). Photo courtesy Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.
A number of artists who Proust referenced in his oeuvre feature as well. They include Rembrandt, Pissarro, Renoir, Fantin-Latour, and Manet; an iteration of water lilies by Monet, of course, will turn up. Vermeer, another Proust fave, will be represented by his 1653–54 work Diana and her Nymphs (alas, no View of Delft, in front of which the author staged a dramatic death scene in The Captive).
The show also draws out Proust’s connections with the theater and fashion worlds. A Georges Clarin painting of Sarah Bernhardt will be featured, highlighting how the author based Lost Time‘s Berma on the famed actor; as will costumes created by Spanish artist Mariano Fortuny, whose designs inspired the fashions of Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes, evoking “that Venice loaded with the gorgeous East.”
JMW Turner, (1834). Photo courtesy Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.
These artifacts will be accompanied by a selection of the author’s books, some on loan from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Among them is Pleasures and Days (1896), his first published volume, its short stories reflecting his tastes in art and his regular visits to the Louvre.
Not least, Proust stans will rightly rejoice at the inclusion of James Tissot’s The Circle of the Rue Royale (1866). The painting is one of the many Proust brings up in his celebrated tome—with a twist. With it, he reveals that his protagonist Charles Swann was based on the very real figure of Charles Haas, a man about town.
James Tissot, (1866). Photo courtesy Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.
“If, in Tissot’s picture representing the balcony of the Rue Royale club, when you figure with Galliffet, Edmond de Polignac, and Saint-Maurice, people are always drawing attention to you, it is because they see that there are some traces of you in the character of Swann,” Proust wrote in the book’s fifth volume, The Prisoner. In Tissot’s work, you’ll find Haas on the right, looking suitably self-assured.
“Proust and the Arts” is on view at Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, P.º del Prado, 8, Centro, Madrid, Spain, March 4–June 8.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
