Chardin and Rembrandt

by Marcel Proust, Jennie Feldman (Translation), Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat (Afterword)

-Only a petty mind, an artist who at most speaks and dresses as such, looks solely for people in whom he recognizes the harmonious proportions of allegorical figures. For the true artist, as for the natural scientist, every type is interesting, and even the smallest muscle has its importance.- --Marcel Proust

Long overlooked in Proust's posthumously published writings, Chardin and Rembrandt, written when he was only 24 years old, not only reemphasizes the importance of visual art to his development, but contains the seeds of his later work. Submitted in 1895 by Proust to the newspaper Revue hebdomadaire (it was rejected), this essay is much more than a straightforward piece of art criticism. It is a literary experiment in which an unnamed narrator gives advice to a young man suffering from melancholy, taking him on an imaginary tour through the Louvre where his readings of Chardin imbue the everyday world with new meaning, and his ruminations on Rembrandt take his melancholic pupil beyond the realm of mere objects.
Published for the first time as a stand-alone volume and newly translated, this edition, part of the David Zwirner Books ekphrasis series, aims to introduce a wider audience to one of Proust's most important pieces on art. -For the true artist, - as Proust writes, -as for the natural scientist, every type is interesting, and even the smallest muscle has its importance.- The same could be said of the author's own work--every essay has its own crucial place in the formation of his groundbreaking oeuvre.
The afterword by renowned Proust scholar Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat, originally published in the French by Le Bruits du Temps, is an impassioned argument in favor of returning to the lost paths of Proust's early thinking. It sees, in the passage from Chardin's world of objects to Rembrandt's contemplative paintings, a movement toward the radical interiority for which Proust would later become widely celebrated as a novelist. Written at the beginning of his literary career, Chardin and Rembrandt gestures back to some of Proust's earliest notes on art, while creating space for what was to come.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Essays, Literature

54 pages, Paperback

Published November 22, 2016

About the author

Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.

Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.

Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.

Reviews

[Molsa Roja(s) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had never had the pleasure to read Marcel Proust, and I believe that given the length of his master oeuvre hardly anyone does these days; that quite excited me, standing at the doors of such a literary figure. And I've found in it both an absolute aesthetic pleasure -for his writing is pure beauty- along with some marvelous insights on painting and life, on looking at paintings as a new opening to the world. Fantastic short piece, accompanied by some great printings of the paintings he discusses. Wonderful.

"The painter proclaimed the divine equality of all things before the mind that contemplates them and the light that embellishes them. He made us leave behind a false ideal so as to enter more broadly into the world of reality and find the beauty that is every-where, no longer the languishing captive of convention or poor taste, but free, robust, and universal; in opening up the real world, he draws us out onto a sea of beauty."

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very young Proust on Chardin and Rembrandt.
Part of David Zwirner Books’s “ekphrasis” series, a collection of rare and out-of-print texts about art and visual culture.

[George Purdy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Regarded by its publisher David Zwirner Books as an unjustly overlooked essay, Chardin and Rembrandt is one of the earliest works of renowned author Marcel Proust. More than a simple work of art criticism, this essay is an act of literary experimentation in which an unnamed narrator describing the works of Chardin and Rembrandt to a young man suffering from melancholy. Imbuing these artworks with his own ruminations on life, I read this work as an introduction to Proust, as it hints at many of the themes that would later characterise his writing. A brief example of budding literary greatness, this essay has left me eager to read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in the near future.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe there's some sense in which reading this unfinished essay, which is less like a fragment than a structure missing a fragment, is like viewing an unfinished painting. If there were some missing corner in a Rembrandt, you would know roughly what the fragment would look like, what its atmosphere would be, because, as Proust argues in this essay, the real subject of a Rembrandt is light, that "being we sense everywhere and can nowhere grasp" (23). A Rembrandt is fundamentally anti-fragmentary, a study of unifying atmospheres. To look at one part of a Rembrandt is to sense the rest of its parts. What Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat does in his afterword to this edition is try to construct the missing section of Proust's youthful essay, or, at least, to speculate about what forced him to stop, about the unwritten thesis that would have unsettled the written. The problem which was insoluble for the twenty-four-year-old Proust concerned the status of the pleasure derived from art. Is it immanent to the painting, in the sense that visual arts draw our attention to the beauty of the everyday, the mundane, even the unpleasantly drab? Or is it some "extraction or elevation of objects and figures beyond time," or in other words transcendentally detached from reality? (50) It seems that it cannot be both of these things, and that if it is either of these things then some supplementation or alienation of the subject matter is underway.

Both Madeleine-Perdrillat and translator Jennie Feldman connect this dilemma with the mature Proust's In Search of Lost Time, which is difficult not to do when talking about anything Proust wrote. But in this case the answer seems to be that the pleasure derived from an artwork, the experience which is extracted from it, is structurally the same as the pleasure of a memory, which is like "time in its pure state," time approached and realised in its formal features and yet still experienced in time (51).

There's a tradition in discussing Proust's long novel of discounting its 'moral' aspects, of considering it a kind of amoralist satire. There is a more recent tradition of pushing back against this account, and I think it would be well served by this short essay, which is, overall, very beautiful and sincere, and seems to revolve around the moral injunction to observe, but to do it carefully and introspectively. On page 18 (and this moment is emblematic of the dilemma Madeleine-Perdrillat points out concerning the conflation of 'real experience' and painting approached as pure repetition of real experience; as Proust puts it, Chardin "found them beautiful to paint because he found them beautiful to look at" (13)) Proust asks us to bear his suggestions in mind next time we look at the face of an older person, because facial expressions are signs in an unfamiliar language of the kinds of things we might also learn from paintings. His moral injunction represents a kind of extension of physiognomic character assessment to extremes - an extreme nominalist physiognomy - where "every type is interesting" and "even a little finger is an excellent exponent of character" (16-17).

I don't know that I take that fully to heart, perhaps simply because physiognomy seems fundamentally flawed, but I think it makes sense to read Proust here as advocating for the cultivation of our visual aesthetic sense in the service of greater self-awareness and sensitivity in general. It is an explicit repudiation of decadence and 'art for art's sake,' and very much reminds me of the Samuel Butler quote (difficult to source outside of that book called A Short Guide to Writing about Art, which it serves as an epigraph) which asks "what is art that it should have a sake?" Here, even though he skirts a dilemma, as discussed, Proust is bold enough to say art for the sake of life.

[Lulu Zen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A young man and an artist. Young man of modest means wishes to move among fineries of the Louvre. The artist transcends a mundane scene of a disheveled kitchen table. Young man is touched by fine-tuning of still life by Chardin, because seeds of beauty are infused into his being by muses of the seven heavens. Young man sees "art" best as glorified existences on the wall, detached from origin. Young man sees beauty more clearly from the paintings of the artist. Artist extrapolates, elevates beauty. Young man becomes artist, for reasons and by processes unknown. - Classicism.


"a little bit of time in its pure state."

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this in the Rijksmuseum: it is a beautiful little book, including pages of reproductions of the Chardin and Rembrandt paintings described. Proust wrote this as a young man, and did not finish it: this means that reading it is frustrating, and no one would have published it, especially in its own edition, if it did not have Proust's name on the front. But the prose is beautiful, and it gives a wonderful sense of what moved Proust about looking at art, and allows the reader to inhabit his visual space for brief moments. Definitely worth reading, though sadly Proust stopped before he had said much about Rembrandt.

[Pardis · Rating 2 out of 5]

کتاب «شاردن و رامبرانت» نوشتهٔ مارسل پروست، نویسندهٔ برجستهٔ فرانسوی، در سال‌های آغازین فعالیت ادبی او به رشتهٔ تحریر درآمده است. این اثر، که به‌تازگی به فارسی ترجمه و توسط نشر آبان منتشر شده، در قالب جستاری به بررسی و تحلیل آثار دو نقاش بزرگ، ژان-باتیست-سیمئون شاردن و رامبرانت، می‌پردازد.

در این کتاب، پروست ما را به سفری خیالی در موزهٔ لوور می‌برد؛ جایی که راوی بی‌نام داستان، جوانی افسرده را همراهی می‌کند. آن‌ها با تأمل در نقاشی‌های شاردن، به اشیاء ساده و روزمره نگاهی نو می‌اندازند و از طریق آثار رامبرانت، به ژرفای درون و تأملات فلسفی دست می‌یابند.

[yuefei · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this a lot more than the Rilke, although this one is just as “minor,” scavenged from the fragments these writers left behind. The afterword is honestly what makes this book: it compares this early Proust with the mature one and in the process provides a theory of art that centres itself on subjective inner work — art as creation, viewing as re-creation (with all the pains and efforts of the first).

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short, unfinished essay, written early in Proust’s career, offers some tantalizing hints of a deep meditation on the role and purpose of art. Even unfinished, it’s worth a read to see how a young Proust grapples with art, the everyday, and how we perceive things. Another fantastic entry in the ekphrasis series. Recommended.

[Sina Tahmasbi · Rating 3 out of 5]

۲۴٫۷٫۱۴۰۴
۱۷:۳۰

خواندن متن بیش از اینکه تحلیلی دقیق در باب نقاشی‌ها از زاویه‌ی پروست به مخاطب بده، اوایل مسیر و ریشه‌ی ذهنیتی رو به ما نشون میده که در انتها به هیبتی به اسم «در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته» می‌رسه. پروست رو به شما چند نقاشی مختلف رو به شکلی ساده می‌شکافه و شما ـ احتمالا با لبخند ـ به جوانی نگاه می‌کنید که تازه راهش رو پیدا کرده.

[Evelyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rather dull and trite essays setting forth Proust’s observations on the art work of Chardin and Rembrandt, and an art educator’s analysis of Proust’s essay contextualized with respect to his magnum opus.

[Darin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charming unfinished essay by Proust, along with a helpfully critical afterword.

[TheDonMonOneJuan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Danish edition. Forlaget Virkelig. Januar 2022

[Terence · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an interesting essay full of description and detail that you would expect from Proust.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short, unfinished essay at the very start of the writer's career. Some brilliant language here and I love that they included color plates of the works mentioned.

[Harald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Om kunsten og dagliglivet.
I dette korte – ufullførte – essayet forteller den unge Proust om hvordan den franske maleren Jean Baptiste Chardin får oss til å se hverdagens scener og alminnelige gjenstander på en måte som lar oss ta innover oss og mestre dagliglivets skjønnhet.

I etterordet tar Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat for seg hvordan Proust behandler temaet i dette essayet i sitt hovedverk På sporet av den tapte tid. En norsk oversettelse finnes i samlingen Utsikt over Delft fra 1996.

https://bokelskere.no/bok/utsikt-over...

[Guy Harrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

crazy essay from a 24yr old

[caity · Rating 4 out of 5]

something so special about this essay, it feels like the tipping point into greatness which makes it so exciting to read. on a more personal note, i love this because i love a comma too proust

the edge of greatness! verve!

[Villa Lena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommended by Zhenya Posternak

[¬Orpheus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Excellent afterword.

[Vincent Thurgood · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a short unfinished essay from 1893 that mentions Rembrandt only on the last couple of pages and is primarily about some domestic interiors by Chardin. The afterword analyses how this is linked to themes in Proust's later writing. All of this doesn't mean it isn't worth reading. In fact it's a fine illustration of the difficulty of writing about paintings and the effect they have on the viewer.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Early essay by Proust. Essentially a personal invention of something akin to phenomenology, inspired by the paintings of Chardin and Rembrandt. “From Chardin we have learned that a pear is as alive as a woman, a pain earthenware vessel as beautiful as a precious stone. The painter proclaimed the divine equality of all things before the mind that contemplates them and the light that embellishes them. He made us enter more broadly into the world of reality and find the beauty that is everywhere. Free, robust, and universal. In opening up the real world, he draws us out onto a sea of beauty.” His side theories on amity and light also made for a goodread.

The real surprise here, though, is the afterward, which gives an M. Knight ending to the whole affair. While the introduction is standard fare ‘this is worth reading,’ the afterward lashes out with surprising vehemence. It asks whether art actually opens us up to the world, as young Proust proclaims, or, like Don Quixote, is it an obstacle, further widening the gap between humans and reality. The afterward answers in the latter, attacks the former, and argues that a more intelligent, older Proust reached the same conclusion. The whole argument is a wild ride. It is so unexpected and so uncompromisingly dismissive.

Personally, I tend to the former, and the afterward, summarizing Proust, gets close to my own beliefs: we should focus less on the actual works of art and their inherent qualities and more on the way they relate to the world around us. There is nowhere this line can be clearly drawn, but the distinction is important if we are to avoid the solipsism of criticism. The end game of an art encounter is to apply what we experienced to life, as lived, as a member of society.

On the pictures themselves, it is the use of light and shadow in Chardin that struck me the most. It is so clearly depicts a world that lives by the candle.