-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.
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.
