The Brooklyn Rail

The label at the entrance to a museum group show should reveal the concept unifying the works on display. Here the label “Proust y las artes” (“Proust and the Arts”) implies that there is some relationship between the more than one hundred old master paintings and modernist works, along with some of Proust’s manuscripts and his novel. But what exactly is the connection between these very varied artworks and that book? Proust knew the Louvre, admired some contemporary painters, and traveled to Venice and (very briefly to see the Giottos) to Padua. He wrote about Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin with great passion and was interested in some famous modernists: Eugène Boudin, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro. And, also, his novel mentions a number of fascinating minor contemporary figures: Jacques-Émile Blanche, Henri-Lucien Doucet and Paul César Helleu.

In this Madrid show, James Tissot’s enormous The Circle Of The Rue Royale (1866), is a reminder of how distant we who wear blue jeans are from these posh gentlemen with top hats, one of them the model for Proust’s protagonist, Charles Swann. In Search of Lost Time presents the transition of France into modernism. At the beginning of the book, Charles Swann is involved in the rediscovery of Johannes Vermeer, Proust’s fictional presentation of a real art world event. And Proust himself was involved in translating and critiquing the then influential visual aesthetics of John Ruskin. The fictional young Marcel spends his summer at the Normandy beachside, in the world of Impressionism. Then, just a few decades later, by the end of the book, during World War I people travel in cars, and Paris is bombarded from the air by the Germans. And the art presented reflects this transition. A few years ago Eric Karpeles’s book Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to in Search of Lost Time, gathered all the visual works mentioned in In Search of Lost Time. Now, going one step further, this Spanish museum has gathered physical paintings by these artists.

The best way to understand the unity of this exhibition is to consider the aesthetic theory presented in detail by one of Proust’s imaginary artists. In the novel’s second volume, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the young Marcel does a studio visit with Elstir, which provides theorizing about his seascape in progress, Harbour at Carquethuit, which is described in considerable detail. In this account, it’s not the young, still naive Marcel who is really speaking, but someone like Proust with a sophisticated knowledge of contemporary art theory. What Elstir shows, we are told—and this explains the attraction of his art—is nature perceived as it is, poetically, and not as we usually view it, under the lazy spell of custom. In particular, Marcel says, Elstir’s metaphorical comparison of the land to the sea blurs distinctions between them, creating a powerful aesthetic unity. In his Norman beach scene the boats at sea and the churches on land are intermingled, blurring the distinctions between land and sea. “The whole painting gave the impression of seaports where waves advance into the land,” Proust writes, “where the land almost belongs to the sea, and the population is amphibious.” The novel offers an elaborate verbal description of Elstir’s seascape. None of the paintings on display exactly matches this description: Proust uses his visual sources creatively.

Sometimes personal happenstance can decisively influence one’s experience of an art show. When I read the announcement of this exhibition early this year, naturally, I was intrigued. I have written repeatedly about Proust and the visual arts, and here was the opportunity to learn something new. And since my goal was to visit Venice, to research another project, it was natural to “stop off” in Madrid and visit the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum. In preparation for that journey, I reread two chunks of Proust: his account of Elstir, which comes relatively early in the novel and the brief account of Venice in The Fugitive, which is close to the end.

It takes Marcel a long time to get to Venice, and when he does he is reminded of his childhood holiday at Balbec. I used to find that relatively brief part of the novel disappointing, as if it was an afterthought. Proust doesn’t say much about Venice, the place Marcel has long longed to visit. Marcel sees what every visitor finds, the palaces alongside the waters of the canals. In particular, he experiences the blurring of the division between land and sea so well captured in Elstir’s Balbec scene. The very detailed account of humble, imaginary Balbec prepared him for seeing his ultimate destination as an art tourist, Venice. And Marcel doesn’t need to say much about Venice because he has already presented that aesthetic theory very thoroughly, in his account of the studio visit with Elstir.

When I got to Venice, I turned my mind back to this exhibition in Madrid. And when I did, to my complete surprise, everything fell into place, and I realized how to resolve my earlier puzzles. What Proust gained from the old master and contemporary works that interested him was a very general way of seeing the world aesthetically, as a site of visual delight. He learned, that is, to look as if the world were depicted by Elstir. And then I recalled something else that I had recently read. In a justly renowned account Pietro Aretino, who was a great friend of Titian, wrote:

See first the buildings which appeared to be artificial though made of real stone. And then look at the air itself, which I perceived to be pure and lively in some places, and in others turbid and dull. Also consider my wonder at the clouds made up of condensed moisture; in the principal vista they were partly near the roofs of the buildings, and partly on the horizon, while to the right all was in a confused shading of grayish black.

I was awestruck by the variety of colors they displayed: the nearest glowed with the flames of the sun’s fire, the farthest were blushing with the brightness of partially burnt vermillion. Oh, how beautiful were the strokes with which Nature’s brushes pushed the air back at this point, separating it from the palaces in the way that Titian does when painting his landscapes!

I don’t believe that Proust read Aretino. He didn’t need to, for his own account (derived from his reading of Ruskin and also, I think from Walter Pater’s The Renaissance) reaches the same conclusion. Aretino continues:

In some places the colors were green-blue, and in others they appeared blue-green, finely mixed by the whims of Nature, who is the teacher of teachers. With light and shades, she gave deep perspective and high relief to what she wished to bring forward and set back, and so I, knowing how your brush breathes with her spirit, cried out three or four times: “Oh, Titian, where are you?”

Nothing could be more Proustian than this commentary. Works of art are not puzzles waiting for a solution. But sometimes you need to resolve a puzzle in order to properly understand what you are seeing. That’s what I discovered in Venice about this great exhibition in Madrid.