Some thoughts on the importance of art in Marcel Proust's 

A la recherche du temps perdu

PART ONE
If you have already read Part 1 then scroll down for Part 2

Marcel Proust - French novelist (1871-1922)

One of the central characters in Proust's novel is the artist he calls 'Elstir' - an entirely imaginary portrait of a 'famous French Impressionist'.

The book's narrator ('Marcel') first meets Elstir at a small, seaside holiday resort in Normandy which Proust calls 'Balbec'.

Balbec - with its broad sands, esplanade and fine hotels  - is  largely based on the real resort of Cabourg, In Normandy.

Marcel is staying at 'Balbec' with his beloved grandmother. This fashionable holiday resort is full of wealthy visitors, some of whom own expensive villas along the coast.

It is a society in which 'Marcel' - the only son of a rich Parisian doctor - loves to move. Marcel is cultured, well read and highly sensitive.

Marcel Proust

In the novel Grandmother and Grandson are staying at the fashionable Grand Hotel in Balbec that is modelled on a real hotel in Cabourg.

This beautiful photograph (below) of the Grand Hotel in Cabourg was taken in 1907 - the year Proust first stayed there. It shows the elegance and style of Proust's imaginary hotel ,with its elegant facade and paved esplanade.

Grand Hotel, Cabourg

It is through the salon window of this hotel that young Marcel notices a band of charmingly boisterous, teenage girls whom he eventually befriends - with the help of the painter Elstir, also staying in Balbec for the summer and whom Marcel has just met.

Elstir is a 'famous Impressionist'. He paints - as far as we can tell - in a style similar to that of Claud Monet:

  
Monet - The cliff at Etretat, sunset (1883)

Amongst this little group of lively and at times, provocative young women is one Albertine Simonet with whom Marcel later falls hopelessly in love.

Proust - with tennis racquet!

Elstir - the professional artist - is a composite icharacter; a complex mixture of Monet, Manet, Moreau, Edouard Vuillard and the American artist, James Whistler (1834-1903).

Manet

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) was a hugely controversial French artist who shocked the art establishment in Paris with his bold subject matter and 'reckless' painting style.

Proust was familiar with the work of all these artists and used that knowledge to create his literary portrait of 'Elstir'.

The importance of Elstir in the novel cannot be underestimated for it is through his eyes that Marcel begins to see the world afresh - more 'innocently' is the term Elstir himself uses.

James Whistler - part model for 'Elstir'

Moreover, it is Elstir who introduces Marcel to 'Albertine Simonet,' a young woman (and lesbian) who plays such a crucial role in Marcel's emotional development throughout the novel.

It is also Elstir who helps establish Proust's notion that we are held prisoner by perceptions, by habit and by the normal machinery of memory which provides only a pale, distorted record of experience.

Manet

In Part 2 I will explore how still-life works by 'Elstir' - largely based on the genre paintings of Manet - helped form young Marcel's unique and highly perceptive 'take' on reality 

PART 2

In Part 1 I tried to establish the importance of art in Proust's great novel. Indeed, the book is full of direct references to celebrated paintings and reveals the author's profound understanding of art, not least Modernism.

Manet

The book is also peppered with classical references. For example, Bloch's appearance as a boy is likened to the portrait of Mohammed II by Gentile Bellini while Odette de Crecy strikes Swan by her resemblance to a figure in a Botticelli fresco.

Eric Karpeles has identified and located the many paintings to which Proust thus makes reference. They run into hundreds. His book is called: 'Paintings in Proust: A visual companion to 'In search of lost time':

I also tried in Part 1 to demonstrate the role Elstir plays in young Marcel's development - both emotional and aesthetic.

Self portrait of James Whistler - the principal model for 'Elstir'

While they both share an antiquarian interest in fine art and a passion for - and knowledge of - local, often ancient churches in this part of Normandy, it is the way objects and people are perceived that marks Elstir's profound influence on young Marcel. 

Village in Normandy

When thinking about this posting I was struck by something Marcel says in Volume 2 ('Within a budding grove' in the Moncrieff translation):

"Having been taught by Elstir how to remember with precision details I would  have formerly brushed aside, my eyes  now gazed at length on things they could not see previously.'

Proust himself developed the detailed observation Elstir espouses by close study of Manet's work. Although genre paintings of (for example) food were traditionally considered a lowly art form by the French Academy, the Modernists gave this humble form greater status, thereby opening art up to a vast range of new subject matter - not least a humble bunch of asparagus:

Asparagus - Manet

Let me prove my point by quoting a passage from the novel itself (Volume 2, page  519 in the Moncrieff translation).

Marcel is staying with his grandmother at the Grand Hotel, Balbec and is seated at table, having just finished his meal.

I have taken the liberty of interposing images by Manet  within this text to make my point - the images are of course absent in the novel itself but demonstrate, I hope, a similar attention to detail by both novelist and painter alike:

"I would now happily remain at table while it was being cleared, and, if it was not a moment at which the girls of the little band might be passing, it was no longer solely towards the sea that I would turn my eyes." 

"Since I had seen such things depicted in water-colours by Elstir, I sought to find again in reality, I cherished as though for their poetic beauty, the broken gestures of the knives still lying across one another,....

...the swollen convexity of a discarded napkin into which the sun introduced a patch of yellow velvet, the half-empty glass which thus showed to greater advantage the noble sweep of its curved sides and, in the heart of its translucent crystal, clear as frozen daylight, some dregs of wine, dark but glittering, with reflected lights, the displacement of solid objects, the transmutation of liquids by the effect of light and shade, the shifting colours of the plums....

...which passed from green to blue and from blue to golden yellow in the half-plundered dish... I tried to find beauty there where I had never imagined before that it could exist, in the most ordinary things, the the profundities of 'still life'.

This close attention to detail is present in another artist and scholar whom Proust admired, John Ruskin (1890-1900). 

Ruskin became Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford and author of 'Modern Painters' (1843), a hugely important book that championed the near-Impressionist landscapes of John Turner.

John Ruskin

Proust was familiar with everything Ruskin had written, not least his celebrated 'Stones of Venice' (1851-53}. Indeed, he even translated a book by his hero, namely 'Sesame and Lilies'. It may well have been  Ruskin who inspired Proust to first visit Venice where part of his novel is set.

Doges Palace, Venice - John Ruskin

John Ruskin was a skilled water-colourist and enriched his books with finely-drawn architectural detail. Below is a sample of his work - an example of his close observation and meticulous  record of important Venetian buildings:

Ruskin

Ruskin transformed the way we looked at buildings - in the same way that Proust's fictional artist 'Elstir' opened young Marcel's eyes to beauty in common objects, human behaviour in all its deceptive complexity, and fine art past and present.

In short, Elstir's revolutionary way of 'seeing' utterly informs Proust's masterpiece and parallels the way the real Impressionists transformed the world of art.

MIKE HEALEY