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- Title
Proust and Old Time: On 'Chardin' and 'Watteau'.
- Authors
Padiyar, Satish
- Abstract
Before Marcel Proust began working on his masterpiece À la Recherche du temps perdu, he had an idea to be an art critic. His youthful essay ‘Chardin’ (1895) constitutes his first important piece of art criticism. Approaching Chardin’s work ‘philosophically’, Proust’s essay draws from the old painter’s work significant ideas about the affective life of objects, the pathos of interiors and interiority, and the shattering of the frame separating museum art from modern life. My essay argues that Chardin’s painting offered young Proust a significant new ‘way’ to begin to approach the ‘involuntary memory’ of Recherche, one that he delineates through his essay’s quasi-Platonic structure. Proust’s later incomplete essay on Watteau shifts his art writing into a more subjective mode; the early ‘art’ Proust becoming before our eyes the later genre-abolishing one.
- Subjects
FRANCE; PROUST, Marcel, 1871-1922; ART &; literature; IN Search of Lost Time (Book : Proust); CHARDIN, Jean Baptiste Simeon, 1699-1779; WATTEAU, Antoine, 1684-1721; ART criticism -- 19th century; MEMORY in literature; TIME in literature
- Publication
Oxford Art Journal, 2016, Vol 39, Issue 2, p311
- ISSN
0142-6540
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.1093/oxartj/kcw013