From Cézanne to Proust.

Translated from French.

From Cézanne to Proust. 🖼🖋

“We often retain a less clear impression of people we’ve seen very often, as the overlapping of different images makes their outlines less distinct.” 🫥

— Marcel Proust, letters to his friend Horace Finaly, (shortly after 8 May 1921), @editions_gallimard 2022, p. 69 📚

This idea, expressed in his private correspondence, is very much in keeping with what the novelist sought to convey in his work. Do you remember the portrait of Albertine, and the mole that shifts across her face, when Marcel tries to reconstruct her features in his memory, at a time when he saw her almost every day? 😨😰

In Balzac’s work, the physical description of his characters was summed up in two or three brushstrokes and remained two-dimensional. 💁🏻‍♂️

In Proust’s work, both physical and moral reality always elude us: it is elusive. 🙅🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️ Proust introduced Time into the novel, which is like inventing the three-dimensional portrait.

One thinks of Cubist portraits depicting, simultaneously, the various facets – all of them unfaithful and incomplete – of a single face; one thinks of the work of the young Picasso, whom Proust met and whose work he was sensitive to. Further on, one is reminded of Picasso’s master: Cézanne 🍎🍊 and his nude silhouettes of male and female bathers… 🌿✨

#contourindécis #portrait #marcelproust #RTP #proustagram #centenairemarcelproust

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@proustagram18 October 2022 · 1

A little bit of trivia: Paul Cézanne never signed his name as “Cézanne” with an accent, even though that is how his name is most commonly written. Strangely enough, in the South – and particularly in Provence, where he was born (and where he produced almost his entire body of work) – people usually spell it “Cezanne”, just as he did. In Paris and more broadly within the art world, particularly after his death (as the art world showed little interest in the father of modern art whilst he was alive), they – if I may say so – tacked an accent onto his name, which has stuck ever since. 🤷🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

@dub_ze_cactus_18 October 2022 · 1

🔥🔥🔥👏👏👏

@proustagram18 October 2022 · 4

Just for a laugh: I wanted to ‘boost’ this post to give it a bit more visibility. Yes, I know it’s a bit of a shame to pay Instagram to beg for a bit of attention, but after all, Proust self-published “Swann’s Way”, so… 💸💸

In short: I don’t know if it’s all those naked bodies that are to blame, or whether I’ve already hit rock bottom with my bank balance… but the request (which costs money, mind you)… hasn’t been approved! 🙄

Let’s have a laugh together… 😂

I’ll make up for it soon by ‘spicing up’ the scene with Charlus at the brothel in “Le Temps retrouvé”: as the censors can’t read, we’re in for a laugh. 🤭

@proustagram20 October 2022 · 2

“Whenever I think of Proust, it is not so much novelists that come to mind – not even Balzac, whose work was so familiar to him – but rather poets such as Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rilke; and to painters such as Manet, Monet, Renoir and Cézanne. Yes, I regard Proust first and foremost as the heir to these poets, to these Symbolist aesthetes, and as the contemporary and rival of these Impressionist painters.”

— Georges Cattaui, “Marcel Proust and His Time”, 1956

From Cézanne to Proust.

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