Proust's search for never-lost works of art

Not one of Marcel Proust's (1871-1922) novels is without works of art! This art accompanied the entire life of the man who literally swooned over Vermeer's View of Delft in 1902 in The Hague, and who loved nothing more than to visit museums and art galleries wherever he went. On the occasion of the centenary of the death of the most famous French writer, the BnF (Bibliothèque nationale de France) has had the good idea of presenting an ambitious and fascinating exhibition on "The making of the work". At the same time, Thierry Laget's delightful book, "Proust et les arts", is being published by Hazan.

One of the essential milestones of A la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust's famous novel suite, written from 1906 to 1922 and published from 1913 to 1927 in seven volumes, the last three appearing after the author's death, consists of the narrator's visit to Elstir's studio in the Normandy seaside resort of Balbec. Elstir, the famous figure of the painter in the novel, who is one of the facets of the protean ideal artist imagined by Proust, and who will become the friend of Charles Swann, one of the main characters of La Recherche, himself a figure of the worldly and cultured bourgeois in search of a vocation, as the writer was himself. Elstir, one of whose manners was inspired by William Turner's Landscape with a River and a Bay in the Distance, a painting that Marcel Proust had discovered at the home of Camille Groult, an art collector who had made his fortune in the pasta and flour trade, and who had fallen in love with the works of the French school of the eighteenth century and the English school.

For the writer did not only frequent the Louvre or the Durand-Ruel art gallery, where he saw Monet's Cathedrals of Rouen, on loan from Isaac de Camondo. He did not only wander through the art cities and artists' studios. He regularly drank tea in the salons of his friends, all of whom were members of the upper middle class or aristocracy. These members of the "good society", as it was called at the time (clearly implying that there was a bad one), were sufficiently well off to be able to invest in all the works of art for sale of the time, which they then decorated on their private walls. Thus Marcel Proust first saw Monet's A Field of Tulips near Haarlem in the home of the Princess de Polignac, which he called "the most beautiful painting" by Monet, and which can now be admired by ordinary people in the Musée d'Orsay.

More than any other work by Elstir mentioned in A la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator is particularly impressed by a monumental painting by the painter invented by Proust, called the Port of Carquethuit. The immense painting enthuses Swann to the point that its analysis alone will take up two pages in the Pleïade! He sees in it the power of art "which opens up a world of ecstasy where death suddenly appears indifferent", writes Marie Zawisza in her article in L'Oeil published in November 2022. In it, the journalist deciphers six "keys to understanding" Marcel Proust's aesthetic education through the arts, including illustrations of the famous View of Delft, by Johannes Vermeer (c. 1560); Landscape with a River and a Bay in the Distance, by William Turner (c. 1840); Purple and Pink, by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1864); Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (Sun), by Claude Monet (1894); Self-Portrait with Bésicles, by Jean Siméon Chardin (1771); and The Dancer Vaslav Nijinsky Standing in Front of the Costume of Orientals in a Garden, by Eugène Druet (1910). It's exciting!

Marcel Proust had only a year to live when he had the opportunity to see Vermeer's View of Delft again in Paris, thanks to the 1921 exhibition at the Jeu de Paume. It made him feel ill. The episode of Bergotte's death, the writer's figure in La Recherche, breathing his last just after being dazzled by this painting, is one of the most famous passages in the book. "This is how I should have written," Proust tells Bergotte. "My last books are too dry, I should have put on several layers of colour, to make my sentence itself precious, like this little yellow wall. Guillaume Fau, head of the department of modern and contemporary manuscripts at the BnF and co-curator of the exhibition "Proust, la fabrique de l'œuvre", explains that "the episode of the little yellow wall expresses what the work of art should be, which Bergotte failed to achieve and which Proust's narrator will try to write".

Marcel Proust's aesthetic culture is therefore present and permeates all his writings. A mixture of Camille Corot, Edouard Manet, Paul-César Helleu, William Turner and Alexander Harrison, is Elstir not also a bit of James Whistler when he paints portraits, Gustave Moreau when he works on mythological canvases, or Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir? "The only paintings by Elstir that Proust describes are those he could have painted himself (...). He uses Harrison, Vuillard, Helleu, Whistler, like carmine, ultramarine, lapis lazuli, burnt sienna", writes Thierry Laget in Proust et les arts (Hazan).

As for the contemporary artists of his time, and their radical artistic proposals, Marcel Proust proved that he appreciated them by being a great fan of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes from 1909 to 1920. In 1917, he marvelled at the creation of Parade, whose text was written by Jean Cocteau, whose music was composed by Erik Satie, and whose cubist sets and costumes were designed by Pablo Picasso. "How beautiful Picasso is", the writer raved. However, he never mentioned the name of the Spanish painter in La Recherche, nor that of Matisse, for example. Modern art was probably not yet fashionable in the "good society" he frequented.

While he loved to stroll through the Louvre in front of masterpieces by Mantegna, Fra Angelico, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Watteau, Millet, Corot and Manet, drawing inspiration from them for the characters and landscapes of his novels, in 1920 Marcel Proust considered three paintings by Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) to be among the finest works in the museum: a self-portrait, a portrait of his wife and a still life. If Chardin fascinated him so much in the years before his death, it was undoubtedly because "this painter taught him that a masterpiece is not born of the subject represented, but of the artist's gaze," says Guillaume Fau. What better definition could there be of Proust's literary work?