Impressionist Proust

 

Chernowitz provides many examples of the way Impressionist art has influenced his writing. All in all, it amounts to this:

One of the most vital characteristics of pictorial Impressionism and one that constitutes perhaps the greatest link between its art and Proust’s is the emphasis on aconceptual sensation. As has already been described in connection with Elstir, this instantaneous first impression involves the reaction which is experienced before the intellect has had time to intervene and interpret things in conventional, rational, causal terms. Whether depicting a quiet street scene such as Manet’s Rue de Berne or a scene full of movement like Courses à Longchamp or even a simple portrait, the Impressionist artist renders his subject as a visual illusion perceived during the split second of this first impression and not as it actually is according to his knowledge of its permanent color and form. (165-166)

   

Manet Rue de Bernes

 

 

Manet Course a Longchamp

 

          

            Manet Portrait of Berthe Morisot

                                                                                                                        

Proust and Painting

 Maurice Chernowitz, author of Proust and Painting, notes how Swann loves to match real people to images found in the paintings of the masters. Chernowitz does much the same thing in his book by matching Proust’s word paintings with what he imagines as the real paintings that inspired the prose.

In this first manuscript, which has remained partly unpublished, Elstir’s art reveals to the narrator the beauty of natural scenes to which he had previously paid no attention. A water-color instills in him the desire to see again in real life scenes of the ocean where the bathers and the yachts are an integral part of the view. Manet, Monet, and the other Impressionists have pictured seascapes exactly like these, where men and boat are one with the ocean and the multicolored passengers are treated as if they were part of a landscape or of a colorful still life. (101)

Manet – Seascape at Berck

Furthermore, Elstir’s studies render the narrator less restricted in his tastes by bringing out the charm of a provincial French town…Here Proust may have thought of Pissarro’s pictures, for the latter pained market scenes and fairs in village squares in Rouen and elsewhere that show a perfect knowledge of village life. (101)

 

Pissarro – The Old Market at Rouen

He quotes this passage where Elstir compares a seaside cliff in sweltering sunshine to a cathedral.

“I spoke to you the other day of Balbec church as a great cliff, a huge breakwater built of the stone of the country, but conversely,” he went on, showing me a watercolor, “look at these cliffs (it’s a sketch I did near here, at the Creuniers); don’t those rocks, so powerfully and delicately modelled, remind you of a cathedral?” And indeed one would have taken them for soaring red arches. But, painted on a scorching hot day, they seemed to have been reduced to dust, volatilised by the heat which had drunk up half the sea so that it had almost been distilled, over the whole surface of the picture into a gaseous state. (II,656)

Monet – Entretat End of Day

 Guided by Elstir, Marcel begins to see the commonplace as beautiful. Chernowitz sees Manet in this word tableau of the dinner table.

…the promenade of the antiquated chairs that came twice daily to take their places round the white cloth spread on the table as on an altar at which were celebrated the rites of the palate, and where in the hollows of the oyster-shells a few drops of lustral water had remained as in tiny holy-water stoups of stone; I tried to find beauty there where I had never imagined before that it could exist, in the most ordinary things, in the profundities of “still life.” (II,613)

Manet – Oysters

Optical Illusions

Marcel visits Elstir’s studio and meditates on the sources of his artistic vision. Here is a concise definition of Impressionism.

Now the effort made by Elstir to reproduce things not as he knew them to be but according to the optical illusions of which our first sight of them is composed, had led him precisely to bring out certain of these laws of perspective, which were thus all the more striking, since art had been the first to disclose them. (II,570)

Proust’s writing is impressionistic in the same way, as in this scene of the Rivebelle restaurant.

All this dizzy activity became fixed in a quiet harmony. I looked at the round tables whose innumerable assemblages filled the restaurant like so many planets, as the latter are represeneted in old allegorical pictures. Moreover, there seemed to be some irresistible force of attraction at work among these various stars, and at each table the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting, with the possible exception of some wealthy Amphitryon who, having managed to secure a famous author, was endeavouring to extract from him, thanks to the magic properties of the turning-table, a few insignificant remarks at which the ladies marvelled. The harmony of these astral tables did not prevent the incessant revolution of the countless waiters, who, because instead of being seated like the diners they were on their feet, performed their gyrations in a more exalted sphere. No doubt they were running, one to fetch the hors d’oeuvres, another to change the wine or to bring clean glasses. But despite these special reasons, their perpetual course among the round tables yielded, after a time, to the observer  the law of its dizzy but ordered circulation. (II,532)

 

Impressions

Marcel views the seascape from his hotel window, and sees changing scenes according to the circumstances: “…as it were the repetition–dear to certain contemporary masters–of one and the same effect caught at different hours…” (II,526) Take the case where he is hungry.

A few weeks later, when I went upstairs, the sun had already set. Like the one that I used to see at Combray, behind the Calvary, when I came home from a walk and was getting ready to go down to the kitchen before dinner, a band of red sky above the sea, compact and clear-cut as a layer of aspic over meat, then, a little later, over a sea already cold and steel-blue like a grey mullet, a sky of the same pink as the salmon that we should presently be ordering at Rivebelle, reawakened my pleasure in dressing to go out to dinner. (II,523)

He has more painterly views, too.

And if, beneath my window, the soft, unwearying flight of swifts and swallows had not arisen like a playing fountain, like living fireworks, joining the intervals between their soaring rockets with the motionless white streaming lines of long horizontal wakes–without the charming miracle of this natural and local phenomenon which I had before my eyes–I might easily have believed that they were no more than a selection, made afresh every day, of paintings which were shown quite arbitrarily in the place in which I happened to be and without having any necessary connexion with that place. (II,524)

I had more pleasure on evenings when a ship, absorbed and liquefied by horizon, appeared so much the same colour as its background, as in an Impressionist picture, that it seemed to be also of the same substance, as though its hull and the rigging in which it tapered into a slender filigree had simply been cut out from the vaporous blue of the sky. (II,525)