Proust and the Arts
Curated by Fernando Checa
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
4 March - 8 June 2025
Portrait of Marcel Proust, 1892
Oil on canvas, 73,5 x 60,5 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Nymphéas, 1916-1919
Beyeler Collection, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel
Brown and silver: Old Battersea Bridge, 1859-1863
Oil on canvas mounted on board, 64,5 x 77,1cm
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover MA
Gift of Cornelius N. Bliss
The museum Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting an exhibition on the importance of art in the work of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, MARCEL PROUST (Auteuil, 1871 - Paris, 1922), recognised both in literature and in philosophy and art theory. The aesthetic ideas that Marcel Proust developed in his work, the artistic, architectural and landscape settings that surrounded him and which he recreated in his books, as well as the contemporary and earlier artists who served to stimulate him are among the aspects that articulate the structure of this exhibition, which aims to highlight this connection and the interrelation between art and his life and work.
To understand Proust it is important to know the Paris in which he lived; the cosmopolitan and rich capital of the Third Republic, its great transformation following Baron Hausmann’s urban reforms, with the introduction of electricity, cars, public spectacles, restaurants and cafés. Proust was fascinated not only by the arts but also by the modernity that was flourishing to such a marked degree at the end of the 19th century. The image of the modern created by the Impressionist painters through their depictions of Paris’s streets and other locations lies at the heart of the Proustian aesthetic and all of this would influence his life and also his writing.
One of the writer’s first published works, Pleasures and days (1896), is presented in the first room of the exhibition, revealing his early enthusiasm for the arts, music, theatre and in particular painting and his frequent visits to the Musée du Louvre. That interest continued in his great masterpiece, the novel In Search of Lost Time, published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. The Paris of the Third Republic, especially the area of the Champs-Elysées, the Bois de Boulogne and the palaces of the aristocracy in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, as well as 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 also portrayed in their paintings. In addition, the importance of the theatre in Proust's work is reflected in the impressive painting by Georges Clairin on loan from the Petit Palais in Paris. It depicts Sarah Bernhardt, who in part inspired Proust in the creation of the character of Berma who reappears throughout the novel.
The exhibition also emphasises one of the most important themes in Proust's work, namely the creation and consolidation in the last decades of the 19th century of a new and modern discipline, art history. It focuses on his fascination for a city such as Venice, which he visited twice, his interest in cathedrals and Gothic architecture, and his less well known “Spanish connection” through figures such as Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo and Raimundo de Madrazo. On display in the galleries are some clothes and fabrics designed by Fortuny in order to present the theme of fashion, which was of such fundamental importance in Proust’s writings and which the exhibition aims to highlight.
In addition to paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Dyck, Watteau, Turner, Fantin Latour, Manet, Monet, Renoir and Whistler, among others, a sculpture by Antoine Bourdelle and the above-mentioned designs by Fortuny and other couturiers of the time, the exhibition includes a selection of books by Proust from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Biblioteca del Ateneo de Madrid and other loans from the Musée du Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée Carnavalet-Histoire in Paris, the Maurithuis in The Hague, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Dead Poet Carried by a Centaur, c. 1890
Watercolor on paper, 33,5 x 24,5 cm
Musée national Gustave Moreau, Paris
The exhibition is structured around nine rooms through which visitors can enter the worlds of Marcel Proust and In Search of Lost Time: Pleasures and Days, the Paris of the period, the novel’s principal character Charles Swann, the aristocratic Guermantes family, the city of Venice, the influence of the British writer and art critic John Ruskin, the arrival of modernity and World War I, the seaside resort of Balbec and the painter Elstir, and the novel’s final volume, entitled Time Regained.
Proust and the Arts: Pleasure and Days
Boy eating Cherries, c. 1858
Oil on Canvas, 65,5 x 54,5 cm
Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon
The first works on display are a photograph of Marcel Proust at the age of 15 taken by Paul Nadar in 1887, and the only surviving portrait of him, painted by Jacques-Emile Blanche in 1892 when he was 21. This room focuses on Proust’s first novel Pleasures and Days (1896), a work that reveals many of the aesthetic and literary concerns which would remain with him throughout his life. The novel includes sections devoted to commentaries on works in the Musée du Louvre which convey Proust’s appreciation of 17th-century Dutch, Italian Renaissance and 19th-century French painting. Two of those works - Portrait of James Stuart, Duke of Lennox and First Duke of Richmond with the Attributes of Paris (1633-34) by Anthony van Dyck and Departure for a Horseback Ride (1660-70) by Aelbert Jacobsz. Cuyp - are shown in this section alongside a preparatory drawing for a third painting, L’Indifférent by Jean-Antoine Watteau, and an illustration by Madeleine Lemaire for the first edition of Pleasures and Days. Also on display are floral still lifes by Henri Fantin-Latour which are included as outstanding examples of this genre, works by Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, a French painter greatly admired by Proust, by Raimundo de Madrazo, a friend of the author, and by Edouard Manet, who is mentioned several times in the novel.
Proust and the Arts: Paris
In Search of Lost Time takes place between approximately 1890 and 1920 and describes the social, artistic and intellectual life of the time through the upper classes. The principal setting is Paris, where Proust was born and lived his entire life. Following major urban improvements to the city, boulevards, avenues, parks and gardens acquired greater importance, as evident in the works on display in this room: Horse Carriages, Avenue du Bois (ca. 1900) by Georges Stein; Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon. Effect of Rain (1897) by Camille Pissarro; After the Luncheon (1879) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and In the Bois de Boulogne (1920) by Raoul Dufy. Also on display are portraits of Sarah Bernhardt (Georges Jules Victor Clairin, 1876), Reynaldo Hahn (Lucie Lambert, 1907), the Venezuelan composer, lover and friend of Proust, and María Hahn (Raimundo de Madrazo, 1901), Reynaldo’s sister and the wife of Madrazo, works that testify to the importance of theatre, music and performance in Proust's life.
Proust and the Arts: Swann's Way
The Circle of the Rue Royale, 1866
Oil on canvas, 175 x 281 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Charles Swann is one of the novel's principal characters and a figure who represents the cultured Parisian haute bourgeoisie, interested in art history, criticism and collecting. To create this figure Proust based himself on various friends and acquaintances, particularly the art critic Charles Haas and the historian, critic, art collector and director of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts Charles Ephrussi, who are present in two works in this room: The Circle of the Rue Royale (1866) by James Tissot, and Portrait of Charles Ephrussi by Léon Bonnat of 1906.
In the novel Swann marries Odette de Crécy and they have a daughter, Gilberte. For the character of Odette Proust was inspired by Laure Hayman, an Argentinean sculptor and the lover of Proust's great-uncle and his father, among others, present here in a portrait by Madrazo of around 1880-85. Also on display are Busto of Anatole France with a Bare Chest (Bourdelle, 1919), depicting the French writer on whom Proust based the character of Bergotte, and two works that are mentioned in the novel: Diana and her Nymphs (ca. 1653-54) by Vermeer, an artist on whom Swann is said to be writing a monograph, and a series of photographs of Giotto's grisailles in Padua.
Proust and the Arts: The Guermantes Way
As a counterpart to the figure of Swann, Proust created the world of the Guermantes, led by the elegant Duchess Oriane de Guermantes and her husband's brother, the Baron de Charlus, an aristocrat, poet and homosexual, both interested in fashion, parties, love, politics and war, as well as painting, music and literature. The poet and aristocrat Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac is the closest model for Charlus. Among the paintings on display in this room are two portraits of Montesquiou, one by Antonio de La Gandara (ca. 1892) and the other by Lucien Doucet (1879), as well as a portrait of the Countess Mathieu de Noailles (Ignacio de Zuloaga, 1913), a friend of Proust and married to Montesquiou's cousin. Visitors can also see two evening coats by Vitaldi Babani (ca. 1920) and Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo (ca. 1912) which belonged to Countess Elisabeth Greffulhe, the principal model for the Duchess of Guermantes and a great lover of fashion, as she is characterised in the novel.
Proust and the Arts: Venice
The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 1834
Oil on canvas, 91,5 x 122 cm
Widener Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Venice is another of the settings for In Search of Lost Time. Proust, who never went to Rome, Florence or Naples, visited it on two occasions. This room displays The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice (1834) by J. M. W. Turner, together with five etchings from a series by James Abbott McNeill Whistler of 1880 and six by Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, works that are comparable in many ways. This section also features several designs by Fortuny (a tunic that belonged to Proust, a Delphos dress and a Renaissance-inspired fabric), as well as a self-portrait by Fortuny (1947), who settled in Venice and whom Proust considered to embody the union of the city with Carpaccio, Ruskin and a taste for the oriental, the exotic and beautiful fabrics.
Proust and the Arts: Ruskin
Interior of Reims Cathedral, c. 1862
Oil on canvas, 201,3 x 131 cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen
A key aesthetic experience for Marcel Proust was the contemplation of France’s Gothic cathedrals, which he visited guided by the writings of the French art historian Emile Mâle and the English writer John Ruskin whose works Proust read, translated and analysed. He travelled by car, driven by his chauffeur, secretary and lover Alfred Agostinelli. This room includes works by Paul-César Helleu, Eugène Boudin, Alfred Sisley, Gustave Loiseau, Armand Guillaumin and Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot depicting churches and cathedrals such as those at Saint Vulfran, Reims and Notre-Dame de Paris, together with drawings by Ruskin of Amiens and Abbeville and a copy of his book The Bible of Amiens (1904), translated and with an introduction by Marcel Proust. Also in this section are two albums of photographs of French cathedrals and churches taken by Séraphin Médéric Mieusement between 1881 and 1885, open to show photographs of Amiens and Rouen.
Proust and the Arts: Modernity
Alfred Agostinelli provided the inspiration for Albertine, a key character in two volumes of the novel in which Marcel Proust included a long digression on jealousy, suspicions of infidelity and forgetting, among numerous other themes. Agostinelli, who died in an aviation accident in 1914, is also essential for evoking Proust's interest in aspects of modernity at the start of the 20th century. He thus appears here in a photograph in his car in 1908, shown alongside woodcuts by Maurice Busset from the series Paris bombed (1918), included here to illustrate the air raids on the city during World War I described by Proust. Works by Giacomo Balla and Jean Cocteau on display in this room exemplify the emergence of the avant-garde at this period, while visitors can also see a set design, two posters and a photograph of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, whose performances Proust regularly attended.
Proust and the Arts: Balbec, Elstir
Balbec, another of the fundamental places for the development of the novel, is a fictional resort on the Normandy coast through which Proust captured the spirit, people, landscapes and atmosphere of towns in northern France such as Deauville, Trouville, Cabourg, Etretat and BegMeil. This area was extremely important for Proust throughout his life, as well as for the Impressionist painters who travelled there to paint outdoors. In turn, Proust used the character Elstir to summarise his interest in painting. He is based on numerous individuals, of whom the most important are Whistler, Moreau, Helleu and above all Monet, in addition to Turner and the American artist Thomas Alexander Harrison, both represented by works displayed in this room.
Proust and the Arts: Time regained
Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul, 1661
Oil on canvas, 91 x 77 cm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Bequest of De Bruijn-Van der Leeuw, Muri, Switzerland
At the end of the novel’s seven volumes the worlds of Swann and the Guermantes come together in one last great party that takes place after the war. By now the narrator is aware that his obligation to make up for “lost time” must consist of describing the origins and development of his personal and intellectual life in an extensive novel, precisely the one that the reader is about to finish. In this volume, entitled Time Regained, Proust reveals the relentless, destructive nature of the passage of time. The exhibition takes up this idea and concludes with two self-portraits by Rembrandt, one of 1642-43 and the other of 1661, and two images of Marcel Proust on his deathbed in 1922 (a drawing by Helleu and a photograph by Emmanuel Sougez), in addition to copies of the first editions of the novel’s different books and volumes: Swann's Way (1913), In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1918), The Guermantes Way (volumes 1 and 2, 1920, 1921), Sodom and Gomorrah (volumes 1, 2 and 3, 1922), The Prisoner (volumes 1 and 2, 1923), The Fugitive (volumes 1 and 2, 1925) and Time Regained (volumes 1 and 2, 1927).
Publication: Catalogue with texts by Fernando Checa, Jean-Yves Tadié, Thierry Laget, Mauro Armiño and Francisco Pérez de los Cobos Orihuel.
MUSEO NACIONAL THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA
Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014, Madrid