Art at the heart of Proust’s masterpiece

“My book is a painting,” Proust said. Descriptions and allusions to pictures real and fictional are woven into almost every page of À la recherche du temps perdu, but no exhibition has previously considered this rich seam. Now Marcel Proust, La fabrique de l’oeuvre, just launched at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris to mark the centenary of the writer’s death, unfolds both the making of the text and, exhilaratingly, its dense visual fabric.

The former is explored through manuscripts, notebooks, first editions galore, including the BNF’s recently acquired Swann’s Way with Proust’s eight-page dedication to Marie Scheikévitch laying out his entire structure: “Madame, you want to know what Mme Swann becomes in her old age . . . I can tell you she becomes even more beautiful.” But the novel’s formation lies decades earlier, inextricably entwined in Proust’s long study of art. This enthralling hinterland emerges through the BNF’s choice loans of paintings, mostly cherry-picked from the Musée d’Orsay.

They open with Jacques-Émile Blanche’s hypnotising, pale-faced portrait of the 21-year-old dandy with an orchid in his buttonhole. Blanche thought it “abysmal” though lifelike: “Marcel wearing tails, the starched front of his shirt creased, his hair a little awry, breathing badly, his magnificent shining eyes encircled by dark shadows due to insomnia.”

Proust loved this “radiant young man who looked as if he were posing in front of the whole of Paris, without timidity or bravado, gazing out from his fine white elongated eyes that looked like fresh almonds, eyes which did not seem to express any thought, but which looked capable of containing it, like a deep but empty pool”. Time passes, unhappiness, illness, follow, “but one look at Blanche’s work, and Proust could recapture his youth” says his biographer Jean-Yves Tadié. The portrait became Proust’s Dorian Gray.

So it is in the novel: memories of paintings, fixed and immortal, thread through lives as they develop, change, end. Most famous is Bergotte weighing up life versus art as he dies before Vermeer’s “View of Delft” — the scene commemorated here by the catalogue of the Jeu de Paume’s 1921 Dutch painting exhibition that inspired it. But the pattern begins almost at the narrator’s cradle.

Here is Hubert Robert’s 18th-century capriccio with its jet of water hitting the clouds, “View of a Park with a Water Fountain”, whose rococo perfection the narrator remembers because his grandmother hung a copy in his bedroom to explain “the several thicknesses of art”. Here galloping through the Bois de Boulogne come the calèche and horses “slender and shapely as one sees them in the drawings of Constantin Guys”; as an adolescent, the narrator recalls “its outlines engraved upon my heart” because he glimpsed Mme Swann reclining in the carriage.

Exhibited alongside page after page of revisions for Swann’s death is James Tissot’s “The Circle of the Rue Royale” (1868), the monumental portrait on a balcony overlooking the Place de la Concorde of a dozen men embodying Parisian high society — from brutal General Galliffet to effete composer Prince Edmond de Polignac. On the fringe stands charming Jewish socialite Charles Haas, model for Swann, and in a meta moment the narrator tells the dead man that because he appears in the novel, “your name will perhaps live. If in Tissot’s picture representing the balcony of the Rue Royale club, when you figure with Galliffet, Edmond de Polignac and Saint-Maurice, people are always drawing attention to you, it is because they see . . . you in the character of Charles Swann.”

Proust treasured his copy of Tissot’s picture, one of so many from which he made art out of art. The BNF unpacks how he started writing as a disciple not of the French novelists but of the English writer and art critic John Ruskin, who anatomised his own times through the prism of Gothic art and whose overriding theme was the artist’s role in society. On display are Proust’s translations of Ruskin, beginning with The Bible of Amiens (1884). It led him to intense studies of the cathedral itself, memorialised here in Charles Marville’s crystalline photograph of the statues adorning its doors. The cathedral suggested an ideal: words too could “give immortal shape to things as can the chisel”.

Like Monet at Rouen, Proust watched the Gothic facade transfigured by sunshine into “gigantic apparitions of gold and of fire”. Before he began his novel, he mused: “Imagine a writer to whom the idea would occur to treat 20 times under different lights the same theme, and who would have the sensation of creating something profound, subtle, powerful, overwhelming, original, startling like the 50 cathedrals or 40 water-lily ponds of Monet.” He was foreseeing À la recherche, equivalent to, and as revolutionary as, Monet’s series paintings in scale, sense of shifting time and perspectives: a symphonic structure built on fleeting instants.

The impressionistic method binds Proust to the great modernising force of French painting; Impressionism helped push him towards the radical conception of a novel of subjective impressions. A “Rouen Cathedral”, morning view, misty with pink undertones and silvery highlights, is here, and Monet’s “Field of Tulips”, landscape dissolving into a vast red sweep. It was previously owned by the Polignacs; Proust knew it intimately from his visits.

That salon world which he loved is conjured by Berthe Morisot’s scintillating, feather-light “Young Woman in a Ball Gown” of 1879, and Giovanni Boldini’s flashy “Robert de Montesquiou” (1897), the ostentatious gay count who was Proust’s model for Baron de Charlus. The portrait matches his description: Charlus/Montesquiou “threw his shoulders back with an air of bravado, pursed his lips, twisted his moustache, and adjusted his face into an expression that was at once indifferent, harsh and almost insulting”.

Proust found his most sympathetic artist friends among Impressionism’s descendants. One was Édouard Vuillard, whose strange shape-shifting scenes — the blocky covers, pillows, walls closing in on an insomniac in “Sleep”; the cavernous, bewildering wartime “The Metro, Villiers Station” — share his own expression of interiority.

Another was social gadfly Paul Helleu, whose wispily elegant “Mother and Child”, depicting his wife at the bedside of his ill son, appears in the section “The Evening Kiss”, where the sleepless child Marcel craves his mother. Helleu, with Whistler, gave his name to the painter Elstir in À la Recherche.

When Proust, pale and starved, died on November 18 1922, Helleu was summoned to draw “Marcel Proust on his Deathbed”. “How handsome he was! You can’t imagine how beautiful . . . the corpse of a man who hasn’t eaten for such a long time, everything superfluous has been dissolved away”, he wrote. Like Madame Swann, Proust in Helleu’s affectionate tribute still appeared exquisite and youthful as if, François Mauriac said, “Time didn’t dare touch him who had tamed and vanquished it.”

To January 22, bnf.fr