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On November 14th, 1904, a wedding took place in Paris at the neoclassical church of La Madeleine of peerless elegance, and public brouhaha. With the trappings of a royal wedding, including specially commissioned music and a veritable who’s-who guest list, the marriage was that of Armand de Gramont, duc de Guiche and Elaine Greffulhe. As reported by the press, however, it was not the bride’s outfit but that of her mother, Elisabeth, that drew the oohs and ahs: an embroidered Byzantine gown in beige lamé with incrustations of pearl, silver thread and paillettes, and a fur-trimmed train. The creation of couturier Frédéric Worth, this dress is featured in the Fashion Institute of Technology’s exhibition, “Proust’s Muse, The Countess Greffulhe.” A fashionable aristocrat, the countess was immortalized as Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes in Marcel Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu, hence the show’s title. The show comes from the Paris fashion museum, the Palais Galliera, where it was titled “La mode retrouvée.”

The sumptuous, sometimes surprisingly modern clothes and accessories dating from the 1890s to the 1930s on display here by designers such as Worth, Vitaldi Babani, Paul Poiret, Mario Fortuny, Jeanne Lanvin and Maggy Rouff certainly make one want to know more about their noble wearer whose intimate circle Proust managed to enter, in part through his friendship with Armand de Gramont. Although the depth of his relationship with the Greffulhes has been questioned, a recent biography of the countess by Laure Hillerin includes correspondence confirming a certain friendliness though perhaps not the intimacy projected by Proust in his novel.

Opening on the heels of “Manus x Machina, Fashion in an Age of Technology” at the Metropolitan Museum, an extravaganza of female high fashion for the most part since World War II, the FIT show features clothes that rival in fabric, handwork, and imagination those recently on view at the Met, done without today’s technological advantages. Worth’s Byzantine gown described above, but also his Lily Dress (1896), an evening dress in black velvet with applications of ivory silk in the form of lilies, embroidered pearls and sequins, and his tea-gown of dark blue velvet cut outs on green satin ground (circa 1897) are cases in point.

Born and raised in a Belgian aristocratic family that was relatively poor but highly cultured and connected to nobility in several countries, Elisabeth de Caraman-Chimay married the fabulously rich real estate magnate, Henry Greffulhe, and soon was siphoning the attention of some of the most powerful men of her time with her famous musical laughter, her tiny waist, her ineffable personality and, of course, her wardrobe. The glittering evening cape by Worth on view at FIT, with a patterns of large abstracted gold flower motifs, worn at a charity event she chaired in support of wounded Russian soldiers in 1904, was based on a gift from Tsar Nicolas II during his visit to Paris in 1896.

Thanks to her high-placed connections, the countess served as a go-between in foreign affairs and national politics, subsidized scientists including Marie Curie and Edouard Branly, and patronized contemporary music, art, and of course haute couture. The organist at her daughter’s wedding was no less than Gabriel Fauré from whom she commissioned an original piece for the occasion. She raised funds for Serge Diaghilev and supported the Ballets Russes. But it is with the show of French decorative arts organized in London by Elisabeth with the sculptor August Rodin in July 1914, that her secret political ambition came to the fore. Hoping for peace to continue, she invited royalty and diplomats from all over Europe who were soon to be on enemy sides.

Her stunning white dress (unfortunately not in the exhibition) symbolized her preference for international coexistence. Proust, who had his own agenda in selecting the colors and styles of his muse’s attire, depicts Oriane in her box at the Opera in the same white dress (according to Hillerin) with a white headpiece “part flower,” “part feather… alive and amorous… running down her forehead and cheeks.” The color white is often said to be the color of women looking for love, and Oriane, like Elisabeth, suffered an unfaithful husband. Both women seem to have handled their situation with irony and wit.

As the muse outlived the novelist by almost three decades, the exhibition includes couture that Proust could not have seen. Even so, it is replete with dresses, but also accessories that readers of Proust may recognize. The captions that accompany the presentations of the objects brilliantly document such connections as does the presentation itself by Valerie Steele, Director of the Museum at FIT. Bathed in the metaphorical darkness of oblivion, some of the clothes on mannequins shine in a blaze of light coming from above, while others manifest a ghostly presence by reproducing on mirrors their horizontal positioning. The countess liked to be photographed in front of mirrors.

One accessory on view at FIT will be particularly meaningful to Proustians: a pair of red shoes by Lagel-Meier dated 1905. The shoes appear in the last moments of The Guermantes Way when Charles Swann has just told Oriane and her husband that he has only a few months left to live. While Oriane refuses to engage in conversation with Swann over his devastating news because she and her husband Henry are already late for a dinner party, they nonetheless delay their departure when Henry discovers, as Oriane is climbing into their carriage, that she is wearing black shoes with her red dress. Throwing a fit, he sends for red shoes for his wife, explaining to Swann and to the narrator, how unbecoming black shoes would be with a red dress. Proust’s critique of the selfishness, self indulgence and superficiality of the Guermantes, and of aristocracy in general peaks in this passage.

Dark green hues and black were the favorite colors of the real countess in her mature days, while pastels like those seen in 18^th century French paintings by Fragonard and Boucher in particular had been her choice for evening dress early in her marriage. Around the time of the Ballets Russes, her clothes, though lacking the bold colors worn by the dancers, adopted an Orientalist look. A loose fitting kimono evening coat (1912) by Babani, and a quasi- geometric short vest (1912) by Mario Fortuny strike a more relaxed “modernist” note in her wardrobe.No more tight corset to accentuate her tiny waist. A black Jeanne Lanvin coat with the motif of a brick wall imprinted on it from 1936 hints at René Magritte paintings in which brick walls are featured and oddly pierced.

For those who would like to know what the Countess Greffulhe looked like, the show includes a number of photographs of her, by famous fashion photographers, among them the German-born Otto, and Paul Nadar (son of the famous Nadar). With her frizzy light brown hair piled high, pouting lips, fine nose and sad dreamy eyes, the photos of her as a young bride do not look like the Oriane Proust describes in the church at Combray, tall, blond, with a pointed nose, red cheeks and piercing eyes. But then the countess grew from awkward and unhappy young bride to alluring self-assured beauty thanks to help from her childhood friend and close relative Robert de Montesquiou (a model for Charlus in Proust’s novel). The show also includes short movie clips of her.

The widowed countess lived through the Second World War, always aloof and always elegantly turned out, though close to financial ruin. Forced to allow a German commandant to occupy her country estate, she used her charm to get him to help feed her beloved greyhounds. Like her creation by Proust, Elisabeth seems to have enjoyed being looked at and photographed though only in poses of her own choosing. She could have hardly suspected that she would lose control of her self-image to the upstart Proust, whose novel she claimed to have never read.

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Thanks to the very fully annotated correspondence, in 38 volumes, we know a great deal about Marcel Proust’s tastes in visual art. When young he frequented the Louvre, went to the Low Countries and, under the spell of John Ruskin, traveled to see France’s medieval churches. He devoted long essays to Gustave Moreau and Monet, and admired a host of minor painters, including Jacques-Emile Blanche and Paul Helleu. And so In Search of Lost Time reveals a sophisticated visual culture. The greatest scene devoted to painting describes in considerable detail the hero’s studio visit with an imaginary artist Elstir, including a very full account of his masterpiece, Harbor at Carquethuit, a picture that has been linked to Degas, Renoir, Ruskin’s drawings, Vuillard, and Whistler. But by the time he was writing his masterpiece, Proust had lost touch with the art world. He met Picasso, but never encountered the pictures of Seurat or Matisse, who realized Elstir’s ambition to do a seashore painting of modern life.

The Search mentions, Karpeles notes, more than one hundred visual artists, most of them old masters. How does this knowledge enter into the novel: in Swann’s obsessive comparison of people and scenes with paintings, in the descriptions of Elstir’s imaginary paintings, in some more general way? What does it mean to say, as the author does, that “writing was the way Proust painted”  (p. 20)? This lavishly illustrated book, with splendid color illustrations in a very reasonably priced volume, matches Proust’s reference to paintings and sculptures, sometimes including the exact picture discussed, though often only a relevant example. Any reader of the Search will enjoy having Paintings in Proust at hand to see Proust’s account of Elstir’s imaginary Bundle of Asparagus illustrated by Manet’s 1880 painting with that title and the passage that alludes to Frans Hals’s The Women Regents of the Old Men’s Almshouses accompanied by that picture.

But what is missing is an explanation of how Proust used these sources. Traditional commentators — George Painter is the most influential —  argue that the Search reproduces the people, places and also art it describes in literal ways.  Thanks to Joshua Landy’sPhilosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (2004), we can now understand why this approach is unsatisfactory. Proust was a creative writer, not someone who copied literally from reality. And so when, for example, his narrator compares departing from a train station to the crucifixion, surely something odd is going on, which cannot really be explained, as Karpeles proposes, by reproducing a Veronese Crucifixion. And when the Baron de Charlus compared people who rush to Thomas Couture’s philosophers, presenting that painter’s Romans of the Decadence doesn’t really help us understand the narrative. Being reminded that Albertine’s gown was Tiepolo pink, are we instructed by juxtaposition of Tiepolo’s pink The Triumph of Zephyr and Flora? Karpeles’s beautiful book responds to Proust’s novel in an oddly mechanical way.

Eric Karpeles, Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to “In Search of Lost Time”
London: Thames & Hudson, 2008. 352 pp. $45 (cloth) (ISBN 978-0-500-23854-7)

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Proust insisted that “A La Recherche du Temps Perdu” (“In Search of Lost Time”) was a work of art, not an autobiography, and that his characters were invented rather than drawn from life. He lost credibility on this point instantly, having written in the first person narrative voice and let slip the name “Marcel” once or twice. But his insistence on art was wishful for other reasons.

The family had became prominent at high levels of French government and diplomacy through Adrien Proust’s pioneering work in the field of epidemiology by the time young Marcel decided upon a literary career. After Proust had made his debut into salon society, his popularity and brilliance began to arouse curiosity about his writing. The success of “Swann’s Way” threw his art and his life into high relief; the author’s resistance to queries only inflamed his friends’ antagonism. We don’t care about that now. The World of Proust both revives and settles the matter. It is filled with beautiful photographs of people he knew who had their portraits taken at Paul Nadar’s studio during la Belle Epoque and even after – from the 1880s to the 1930s. Among them are several pictures that Proust himself owned and cherished.

Paul Nadar was the portraitist of the late 19th century, having inherited the studio and archives of his father, the great Gaspard Félix Tournachon Nadar. Nadar, as Nadar père was known, had photographed writers and artists living in Paris during the period 1854 – 1870. He posed the sitter simply, against a plain background. Some say this was due to the fact that photography was still new and following in the tradition of engravings, but Nadar’s approach to life was neither tentative nor traditional. He had started out as a caricaturist during years of bumptious political upheaval and censorship. He dressed in “Republican” red (as in the guillotine, not the Elephants); he flew over Paris in a hot air balloon with his tripod and camera; he could, and would have, trussed up the scene behind his sitters if he’d wanted to. Perhaps its absence gave those who came to him a feeling of more levity than they would have had at a typical carte-de-visite studio. At any rate, radical politics were expressed very differently at the house of Nadar when Paul took over the studio in 1886 after a 16 year apprenticeship under his father.

Sitters would henceforth wear fancy clothing, hold props, and pose before decorative or contextual backgrounds. Marcel Proust at the tender age of 16 looks out at the camera with his extraordinary eyes, a large white collar and bow-tied cravat around his neck. Emile Zola peers calmly through his pince-nez, hair combed back, dressed in a heavy fur-trimmed coat over a close-fitting vest. His long watch chain drapes conspicuously and one hand is tucked in a trouser pocket. Comte Robert de Montesquiou strikes a pose with a walking stick and expensive top hat. Six portraits of “the Voice of Gold” Sarah Bernhardt, onstage and off, are exquisitely styled to highlight her languid yet arresting presence. Claude Monet took off his hat, trimmed his hair, and wore a dark suit for his portrait. Even in profile his eyes twinkle. Paul Nadar kept the studio going past the turn of the century, and a soft focus portrait of Jean Cocteau from 1930 (back to the simple background) was perhaps the last one he did that was related to Proust’s circle. Proust died in 1922, Nadar in 1939.
Paul Nadar’s widow entrusted the French government with the entire archive of the Nadar studio in 1950. It has taken since then to catalogue one-fifth of the 400,000 glass plates and vintage prints. “The World of Proust as seen by Paul Nadar” is actually based on a 1991 exhibition that took place in Paris at the Hôtel de Sully, near the Place des Vosges.

Anne-Marie Bernard, credited as the editor of The World of Proust, is an authority on the Nadars’ oeuvre, and works within the Photographic Archives Department of the French Ministry of Culture. Bernard sifted the archives to shake out Proust’s characters beginning with the Narrator himself. Each portrait is given a caption stating who the sitter was in real life and what relationship he or she bore to which Proust character(s). Swann is based on one Charles Haas, a dandy whose fame did not exceed his own lifetime. The Princess and Duchess de Guermantes are composites of several women, aristocratic and not so. Bergotte is and is not based on Anatole France, a writer who greatly influenced the young Proust. Monet inspired Elstir for the most part, and Gabriele Fauré’s music probably served as a model for the Vinteuil sonata that figures so prominently. Chapters are organized into broad cateories entitled “Family Intimates;” “Society Life;” “Literature and the Arts;” “The Ballroom & The Stage;” and “Residences.”

The book offers a number of “full frame” or uncropped reproductions that reveal the scene in front of the camera with all of its staging: assistants hike up a curtain; flimsy painted flats tilt; sitters hold in their laps reflective discs to increase the lighting contrast on their features ever so slightly. No apologies are made for wear and tear on the negatives, either. Holes, cracks, staining and other imperfections occasionally appear, which suggests that some new prints were made from existing glass negatives. In his day, Paul Nadar excelled in the controversial practice of retouching. A number of “before” as well as “after” prints were preserved in the archive and have been reproduced in the book to illustrate this technique. The technicalities of Paul Nadar’s photographic studio will certainly exceed most Proust readers’ interest, but in terms of period detail they’re fascinating and will amuse any artist interested in portraiture, its history, and its artifice. Bernard wrote two introductory essays discussing the art of photographic portraiture and retouching. In the back of the book there are notes for the captions, biographical data, a bibliography, and an index. In terms of organization, thoroughness, and clarity, it has a feeling of great completeness.

Nevertheless true Proustians may find this book bittersweet. Unveiling Proust’s characters is both a supreme gratification and a desperate compromise, like telling a secret – a brief sensation of triumph followed by the sadness that comes with betraying a friend. But of all friends, he might have understood this little crime against art. The delight of anticipation (a person he wished to meet, a place he wished to visit) followed by the terrible disappointment of reality was a subject he wrote about at length in the novel. Imagination is continually pitted against the risk of knowing. It’s no surprise, really, that the Narrator would instigate in his readers a desire to know Proust the author and his characters. That desire is at once gratified and destroyed by “The World of Proust as seen by Paul Nadar.”

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