The Thyssen Museum addresses Proust’s link with the arts

Madrid. The French writer Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was a polyhedral author, a Renaissance who was not only learned in literature, history and philosophy, but also in painting and music. One of his great passions was pictorial art, which was fascinated for the first time in one of his visits to the Louvre Museum in Paris, where he spent long hours contemplating his rooms and corners.

The Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid inaugurated the exhibition Proust and the arts, In which through 136 pieces, most paintings, but also sculptures, tunics and textiles, books and engravings, enters that Proustian universe of wisdom and exquisite sensitivity.

Each work exposed as well as A series of Russian dollsthat when it opens it leads to another reference that combines in some way in Proust and its Cathedral soap opera, In search of lost time.

The curator of the exhibition, the historian and thinker Fernando Checa, explained that there are painters who are scattered throughout Proust’s work; Above all, he highlighted Claude Monet, Rembrandt Ya Vermeer, who not only became a source of inspiration and study for the French novelist, but also came alive, either with his paintings or with references to his biographies, in his literary work.

In search of lost time It is the axis that the exposure is vertebra through which they are visited from the Parisian landscapes of the late nineteenth century, mainly, the high bourgeoisie and the aristocracy in which the characters of Charles Swann and the Duchess of Guermantes develop, to the figure of Elstir, literary creation of Proust to reflect the painter par excellence, which, in the judgment of the curator, It is a mixture of Whistler, Moreau, Heller and Monet.

For Proust, the artist acted, according to the director of the Madrid Museum, Guillermo Solana, Like the oculists: it submits us with their painting or prose to a treatment that is not always pleasant. The world has been created as many times as an original artist has emerged. Only through art we can get out of ourselves, and thanks to it, the spectator or the reader leaves a world, ours, and we see it multiply.

The aesthetic ideas that Proust develops in his work, the artistic, monumental and landscape environments that surrounded him and that recreates in his books, as well as the contemporary artists or the past that served as a stimulus, are some of the aspects that articulate the journey of the exhibition.

The purpose is to highlight that bond and the interrelation between art and its figure, their life and its work. Hence, the Paris in which he lived; That is, the cosmopolitan and rich capital of the third republic, its great transformation after the urban reforms of Baron Haussmann, with the appearance of electricity, cars, shows, restaurants and coffees.

Passionate about modernity

Proust was passionate not only of the arts, but of that modernity so booming at the end of the 19th century. The image of the modern that the impressionist painters created through their representation of the streets and other environments of Paris is at the base of Proustian aesthetics: all this would mark their biography and their writingsCzech explained.

His first published work, The pleasures and days (1896), is presented in the opening room of the exhibition, and shows its early taste for arts, music, theater and, especially, painting and its frequent visits to the Louvre. But above all are the scenarios of your Cathedral soap operaas he defined it, such as the Champs Elysees or the beaches and coasts of northern France, some of the scenarios in which the novel develops and that they reflected in their paintings Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Eugène Boudin or Raoul Dufy. In addition to the importance of the theater in his work, which is reflected in the exhibition with the painting of Georges Clairin of actress Sarah Bernhardt, on which it was based, among others, to create the character of the berm, present throughout the novel.

The exhibition also emphasizes one of the most outstanding themes in the work of Proust, that of creation and consolidation in the last decades of the nineteenth century of a new and modern discipline, the history of art, as well as in its fascination for a city like Venice, to which he traveled twice, in his interest in the cathedrals and the Gothic architecture. In addition to Rembrandt paintings, Johannes Vermeer, Anton Van Dyck, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Turner, Henri Fantin-Latour, James McNeill Whistler, Manet, Monet or Renoir, among others, a sculpture by Emile Antoine Bourdelle, the designs of Fortuny and other creators of the time.

The exhibition includes a selection of Proust books from the National Library of France and the Madrid Athenaeum, and other loans from the Louvre, the D’Orsay Museum and the Carnavalet of Paris, in addition to the Mauritshuis of the Hague, the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam, the Frank Fort Museum and the National Gallery of Art of Washington.

At the end of that imaginary journey of innumerable literary and pictorial references, the exhibition ends with the exhibition of the seven volumes of the novel, which highlights a passage in which the narrator is aware that his obligation to recover the Lost time It is none other than describing the origin and development of your personal and intellectual life in a great novel, as well as showing the implacability of time. That idea is accompanied by two Rembrandt self -portraits, one between 1642 and 1643, and another of 1661, and two images of Marcel Proust in his death bed, in 1922 (a draw of helleu and a photograph of Emmanuel Sougez), while hearing the first movement of the violin and piano pian Tour the entire Novel Summit of Proust.

The exhibition can be seen as of today and until June 8.