Proust and the Arts

Georges Jules Victor Clairin, Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, 1876, Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris © Paris Musées.

Proust and the Arts highlights 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 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. 

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 of the 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.