Proust and the Arts

Curated by Fernando Checa, this wide-ranging exhibition at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza explored the central role of the visual arts in the life and work of Marcel Proust (1871–1922). Drawing on loans from the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Mauritshuis, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the show traced how Proust wove more than a hundred painters, sculptors, and designers into the fabric of À la recherche du temps perdu, using them both as biographical touchstones and as aesthetic arguments. The first room opened with Proust’s debut book Pleasures and Days (1896), revealing an enthusiasm for painting that deepened throughout his career.

Vermeer occupied a privileged position in the exhibition and in Proust’s imagination. In the novel, the character Charles Swann is writing a monograph on Vermeer, and in The Captive the writer Bergotte collapses and dies before the View of Delft, haunted by the little patch of yellow wall he felt he had never equalled in his own prose. The View of Delft could not travel from The Hague, so the exhibition instead presented Diana and Her Companions (c. 1653–54, Mauritshuis) as its Vermeer loan, one of the painter’s earliest surviving works and evidence of his ambitions as a history painter before he settled into the domestic interior scenes Proust knew best.

The exhibition was organised thematically around the settings and obsessions of In Search of Lost Time: the Paris salons painted by Tissot and Helleu, the Venice of Turner and Whistler, the Impressionist canvases Proust encountered in his youth, and the fictional painter Elstir, whose composite identity drew on Monet, Moreau, and others. Works by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Watteau, Fantin-Latour, Manet, Renoir, and Whistler accompanied the Vermeer, together with a sculpture by Antoine Bourdelle and garments and fabrics by Fortuný, whose designs surface repeatedly in the novel. A catalogue with essays by Checa, Jean-Yves Tadié, Thierry Laget, Mauro Armiño, and Francisco Pérez de los Cobos accompanied the show.