Picturing Proust

Proust uses so many artists in his grand work that there was recently published a book, Paintings in Proust by Eric Karpeles, providing the images Proust directly mentions, or offering possibilities for the ones to which Proust only alludes. Swann loves Odette through Botticelli. The pregnant kitchen maid is Giotto's Charity. Bloch is seen as Mahummet II. Charlus likens his young friend Morel as a Bronzino. The list continues so that all characters are eventually attributed a pictorial relation. Even his perfect mother.

There are even wonderful academic articles on Proust's mention of art...and that is astounding and a joy because scholarly journals are not known for their prose style.

Proust translated Ruskin into French (with the help of his mother) and wrote articles in the Gazette des Beaux Arts on artists and shows, in Paris or abroad. He wrote poems as a young man based on paintings. He was always passionate about art, going to see his favorite Vermeer when it was being shown in Paris despite his current illness. He transformed his museum visit into the scene in In Search of Lost Time where Bergotte (the novel's author character) must see Vermeer’s View of Delft because of a critic’s having written about a little patch of yellow. The color is indeed perfect and Bergotte dies in the gallery, wishing he had written with a few more layers of color, like this little patch of yellow. Proust would die shortly thereafter, having already been ill and having gotten worse from the trip to see the painting.

Proust is largely depicted as a homosexual with an Oedipal complex, compulsively writing alone at night, after years of being a social climber. But there is a Proust who can not appear in any photographs because he is only visible in his writing on the arts. There he is glorious, strong and secure in his own passion. For this reason, among others, I prefer to avoid psychological readings of his work, dismayed at how easy it is to debase the heights he climbs with language.