Tim Keane on Proust's Transition to Art Criticism

Hyperallergic's Tim Keane draws readers' attention to the moment when Marcel Proust shifted to art criticism, as suggested by Eric Karpeles's Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time (Thames & Hudson, 2017). "Perhaps the most ironic, darkly comic, and touching death scene in 20th-century literature takes place in front of Vermeer’s painting “A View of the Delft” (1660-1661) in Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927)" writes Keane, in the beginning of his review. From there: 

Bergotte, a terminally ill novelist who has had a decisive influence on the narrator’s writing vocation, remembers that “A View of the Delft” happens to be on view in Paris, on loan from the Mauritshuis in The Hague. And so, defying frail health, he improvises a meal and hurries out. In the gallery, guided by an art critic who compares Vermeer’s refinement to that of Chinese artists, he studies the painting. But his analytical powers surrender to a mesmerizing tiny patch of yellow wall beneath a roof.

The yellow flourish is so awe-inspiring that Bergotte regrets the verbose overkill in his own books. His self-loathing is cut short by stomach pain. Doubling over, he assumes the sharp ache must be food poisoning from undercooked potatoes. As passers-by in the gallery offer help, he drops dead.

Like much in Proust’s novel, the scene has sly autobiographical roots. In May of 1921, a year before he died, Proust himself risked poor health to see an exhibition of Dutch painting, including “A View of the Delft,” at the Jeu de Paume. In this respect, visual art bookends Marcel Proust’s life and writing career.

In the new Letters to His Neighbor (New Directions 2017), Proust mails a copy of his first book, a collection of verse called Portraits of Painters (1896), to an American dentist living upstairs

Both the early Portraits of Painters and the Vermeer death scene, written decades later, along with constant literary references to visual art in between, beg a critical question — why did Proust, the archetypal “writer’s writer,” who spent 10 years composing and revising a 4,000-plus-page book, plant hundreds of references to visual art in the quintessential novel about the writing life?

Find out at Hyperallergic.