Painter Who Obsessed Proust in His Fictional Art Critic Bergotte Crossword Clue for
Art
Pictures Worth Thousands of Words
EVEN earlier Marcel Proust died in 1922, ordering iced beer from the Ritz on his deathbed, his monumental novel about fine art and memory was existence dissected for wisdom on a stunning diversity of topics.
It has been historic for its obsessions with everything from Norman architecture to optics, homosexuality, classical music, botany, tactical warfare, fin de siècle fashion and princely copper-pot French cuisine. (In one passage the narrator describes Françoise, the enduring housekeeper, combing Les Halles for the choicest cuts of meat, like Michelangelo in Carrara, "selecting the virtually perfect blocks of marble for the tomb of Pope Julius 2.")
Proust has even been hailed as a pioneer in the field of brain part ("Proust Was a Neuroscientist," by Jonah Lehrer) and as surely the strangest self-help author in the canon ("How Proust Can Change Your Life," by Alain de Botton).
And so it's remarkable that before now no ane has focused at book length on painting, a subject that dominates his novel — "In Search of Lost Time," or if you prefer, the more melodic Shakespearean "Remembrance of Things Past" — similar almost no other.
As Eric Karpeles, a painter, points out, Proust names more than 100 artists, from Bellini to Whistler, in the novel and mentions dozens of actual works from the 14th through the 20th century, making the novel "1 of the about greatly visual works in Western literature."
In its pivotal moments, paintings often play supporting roles, as when Charles Swann, a leading candidate for fiction'due south nearly tortured character, wills himself into dearest with the faithless courtesan Odette de Crécy partly because she resembles a figure in a Botticelli fresco: "The words 'Florentine painting' did Swann a great service. They allowed him, similar a championship, to bring the image of Odette into a earth of dreams."
Mr. Karpeles has now helped translate the dreamlike visual passages of Proust back into the images that inspired them. His guidebook "Paintings in Proust," just published by Thames & Hudson, makes up a kind of free-floating museum of the paintings, drawings and engravings that figure or are evoked in the novel. Even for those who accept never scaled the iii,000 pages of Mount Proust, the book presents a lush coffee-tabular array snapshot of the artistic spirit of Third Republic French republic as filtered through Proust's keen sensibility, formed mostly in the Louvre, with excursions (real or imaginative) to Florence, Venice, New York and London.
Just for Proust cultists, the drove of more than than 200 reproductions will undoubtedly be greeted with the literary equivalent of a hosanna. It fills a longstanding gap in the huge shelf of books — including ones by Samuel Beckett, Edmund Wilson, Roger Shattuck and Gilles Deleuze — devoted to navigating and agreement the novel. While some of the its painting references are famous enough to call the images to listen — Rembrandt's "Night Scout," details of Michelangelo'due south Sistine Chapel ceiling, "The Angelus" by Millet — many are non. And some of the artists mentioned, like the society portrait painter Jules Machard, accept fallen then far from art history's pages that fifty-fifty digging up reproductions would crave detective work.
"This grew out of my ain desire to exist able to run into these paintings in one place — and looking to meet if such a book existed, I couldn't find anything," said Mr. Karpeles, who added that he had come across only a doctoral dissertation that focused on paintings in Proust and a book published in a small printing in Bogotá, Colombia, in the early on 1990s with a number of black-and-white reproductions. "If you can't conjure up the visual analogy that Proust is making," he said, "then I think you lose many of the insights in the volume."
In late 2003, when Viking began publishing a landmark serial of new translations of "In Search of Lost Time," Mr. Karpeles, 54 — who barbarous in love with the novel as a high school educatee in New York and has studied it devotedly through the years — was spurred to action. "I thought, 'Aha, this is when I'm finally going to practise what I e'er said I was going to practice, which is to rails downward these paintings,' " he said.
Only the personal projection grew so large that it became a professional person i. Mr. Karpeles wrote a proposal to create a visual companion to Proust, twinning the images with corresponding passages from the novel, using C. K. Scott Moncrieff's original English translation as revised by Terence Kilmartin in 1981 and D. J. Enright in 1992. Mr. Karpeles found a boyfriend Proustian, Robert Adkinson, an editor (now retired) at Thames & Hudson in London, in 2006 who agreed to have on the book, not an like shooting fish in a barrel or inexpensive one to publish because of the number of reproductions and the cost of permissions.
Even when the permissions weren't expensive, they proved circuitous. The estate of one minor neo-Impressionist, Henri Le Sidaner — his work is praised in the novel by a boorish lawyer, who prefers information technology to that of Monet — declined to participate in Mr. Karpeles'due south project because of concerns that information technology would only remind people of Proust's sly ridicule.
Merely most of the paintings woven into the novel'south pages are in that location because Proust loved them and used them to amplify descriptions and evoke moods. (The narrator, Marcel, an broken-hearted traveler, compares foreboding Parisian skies to those in the piece of work of Mantegna or Veronese, "below which only some terrible and solemn act could be in procedure, such as a departure past train or the erection of the Cross.")
Second maybe just to music, painting is the vehicle used in the novel to examine the mysterious commerce between perception, memory and art. The art critic John Ruskin was one of Proust's most important influences. Proust's graphic symbol Elstir, a Zen-like Impressionist thought to be fabricated upward of pieces of Whistler, Monet, Gustave Moreau, Édouard Vuillard and others, is important not only in terms of plot — Elstir introduces Marcel to Albertine, who will go his faithless love involvement — simply also in terms of ideas.
Elstir can come off at times every bit Proust'southward extravaganza of the beret-draped Romantic, rushing to the embankment at night, naked model in tow, to capture a sure quality of moonlight. Only Elstir's artistic ideal, to perceive things more than innocently — or as Beckett describes it, to correspond "what he sees, and not what he knows he ought to see" — is profound. And it goes to the heart of one of Proust'southward principal themes: that we are held prisoner by preconceptions, by habit and past the normal machinery of memory, which provides only a pale, distorted record of experiences.
At the end of the novel, the narrator resolves to devote the rest of his life to writing the novel that will become "In Search of Lost Fourth dimension." He stands at a political party surrounded by many of the novel'south aging main characters and past the paintings of his dearest Elstir, which Proust has described so vividly it is easy to forget that they don't exist somewhere, maybe in a room of their own at the Louvre.
Only the insight that Proust has the narrator draw from such imaginary fine art seems equally authentic and powerful now as it ever did: "It is just through art that we tin escape from ourselves and know how some other person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise accept remained every bit unknown as whatsoever there may be on the moon."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/arts/design/02kenn.html
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