Language: Spanish
Format: 16,8 x 24 cm
Pages: 336 pages
Binding: hardcover, chrome-plated hardback
136 catalogue works, including paintings, drawings, illustrations and books. Includes chronology and bibliography
Authors: Mauro Armiño, Fernando Checa Cremades, Thierry Laget, Francisco Pérez de los Cobos Orihuel and Jean-Yves Tadié
ISBN: 9788417173999
This publication, like the exhibition it covers, deals with the importance of art in the work of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Marcel Proust (Auteuil, 1871 - Paris, 1922), renowned in literature as well as in philosophy and art theory. The aesthetic ideas that Proust develops in his work, the artistic, monumental and landscape environments that surrounded him and which he recreates in his books, as well as the contemporary or past artists who served as a stimulus for him are some of the aspects that articulate this project. The aim is to highlight this link and the interrelationship between art and his figure, his life and his work.
To understand Proust, it is important to know the Paris in which he lived, that is, the cosmopolitan and wealthy capital of the Third Republic, its great transformation after the urban reforms of Baron Hausmann, with the appearance of electricity, cars, shows, restaurants and cafés. Proust was fascinated not only by the arts, but also by the modernity that was so much in vogue at the end of the 19th century. The image of modernity created by the Impressionist painters through their depiction of the streets and other atmospheres of Paris is at the basis of Proustian aesthetics: all this would mark his biography as well as his writings.
One of his first published works, Los placeres y los días (1896), already shows his early taste for the arts, music, theatre and, especially, painting and his frequent visits to the Louvre Museum. This interest continued in his greatest work, the novel In Search of Lost Time, published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. The Paris of the Third Republic, especially the area around the Champs-Elysées, the Bois de Boulogne and the aristocratic palaces of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the beaches and coasts of northern France, are some of the settings in which the novel takes place and which painters such as Manet, Pissarro, Renoir, Monet, Boudin and Dufy depicted in their paintings. The importance of the theatre in Proust's work is also reflected in the impressive painting by Georges Clairin, from the Petit Palais museum in Paris, depicting Sarah Bernhardt, on which he based, among others, the character of Berma, who is omnipresent throughout the novel.
Emphasis is also placed on one of the most outstanding themes in Proust's work, that of the creation and consolidation in the last decades of the 19th century of a new and modern discipline, the History of Art, on his fascination for a city like Venice, to which he travelled twice, on his interest in cathedrals and Gothic architecture and on the writer's not so well known ‘Spanish connection’ through the figures of Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo and Raimundo de Madrazo.
This tour includes paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Dyck, Watteau, Turner, Fantin Latour, Manet, Monet, Renoir and Whistler, among others, a sculpture by Antoine Bourdelle and the aforementioned designs by Fortuny and other artists of the period, as well as a selection of Proust's books.
